First of all, broke college students certainly aren't going to 'tip' their professors. I guess perhaps you're thinking part of tuition will be used for this?
Still, what students 'enjoy' is not necessarily what is most beneficial for them in a college course. I think you're setting up the incentives wrong.
Exactly. The majority of them just want the highest grades with the least effort, and the professors who will quite naturally want to get tipped more, will optimise toward that. It'll create a situation where teaching next-to-nothing and giving everyone perfect scores gets the highest rewards; i.e. not much of an education.
I wasn't interested in paying lots of money for nothing. I also wasn't interested in attending a university known for easy grading.
Maybe you are in that "highly skilled" group. Unfortunately, average student have different behavior.
But I like being pushed hard in a class - it brings out the best in me. Easy A's just engender boredom and contempt.
I remember once being pushed to enter an athletic competition where the field was not so good. "It'll be an easy win for you" I was told. That made me completely uninterested. I entered one where I was told "You'll be in way over your head." and I was. I came in last - but there was never a more satisfying one to me, because it was my best job ever, and just being on the field with those other excellent competitors was exciting.
An analogy would be just qualifying for the Olympic team, even if you have no hope of getting a gold.
On HN, I imagine a significant number of us here are sufficiently motivated to learning even without anyone to remind them of its importance.
What a sad way to live, and I wouldn't hire one of them, either.
I found the course catalog at college to be exciting reading, and was frustrated to be only able to take a small fraction of what was available.
I remember several "aha!" moments where suddenly I understood something that had always baffled me, and felt like I'd been given the keys to the universe.
He said sarcastically. Ah well, I guess that's a lesson learned re: snark and downvotes. There's a lot to say about the 'signaling' point made upthread, and I agree with that.
Anyway, the important issue here is that course evaluations can serve two purposes. One purpose is the structural elimination of "bad" instructors, by linking promotion and retention decisions to course evaluations at the departmental and/or university level. I can tell you from my perspective, course evaluations have never realistically served this purpose at the two institutions where I taught.
The other purpose is to provide concrete feedback to the instructor so that they can improve their teaching the next semester. Official course evaluations are rarely useful for this purpose either, and in my experience ask the wrong questions (and at the wrong time - wouldn't it be better to get feedback from your students after three weeks so you can make course corrections?) So good professors tend to supplement official feedback forms with feedback instruments of their own design.
This is already overwhelmingly the case in an attempt to secure more and more student loan funds.
I have taught at two higher-ed institutions. In one, each student was given a 20-question evaluation. Of those twenty questions, two were of any importance to the instructor: overall instructor and overall course. The other eighteen were frequently ignored by administration and had absolutely zero influence on tenure, promotion, raises or retention. Those two examined scores were averaged over all course over the entire year, but not weighted - you'd have a six-person course count as much toward your final average as a sixty-person course. The scores were from 1 (bad) to 5 (good). You needed an overall average of 3 on each scale to avoid being fired. Higher scores yielded no tangible (or intangible) rewards. Every faculty member taught enough grad-level courses (PhD in particular tend to yield all 5s) that nobody ever really worried about their evaluations from an enforcement perspective. Those of us who cared about actually improving our practice had better ways to get honest reflections from their students. Personally, I tended to get low-ish evaluations from students expecting an easy A ("Professor __ expects his students to work really hard and learn" "He thinks he's the King of Science" etc etc), and high evaluations from students who wanted to learn the stuff the course was about.
Of course, I also got better over time and so did my course evaluations. I also got better at gaming the system. Add too much reading to the syllabus, and remove an assignment or two so you can be "responsive to student needs", for example.
At the other institution, course evaluations were ignored entirely. They played no role whatsoever in anything. On the other hand, I had a better time teaching those students, and according to my evaluations that had no impact on my career, I was doing a better job of it to boot.
Of course, anecdotes vs data, etc etc. Still, I think tips are the way to go. We already know mean course evaluations can be predicted by the grades students expect to get [1], so let's just flip that around a little.
[1]: https://stat.duke.edu/~dalene/chance/chanceweb/153.johnson.p...