JPAE at 25: Looking back and moving forward on teaching evaluations

Abstract

In many if not most colleges and universities in the United States, raw scores from Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are the primary tool of teaching assessment, and teaching evaluations often have real consequences for promotion and tenure. In 2005, JPAE published an article on teaching evaluations, and this article added to what was at that time a somewhat thin literature indicating that SETs are systematically biased against female faculty, and probably against older and minority faculty. Since that time, this literature has swelled and grown and now the evidence that SETs are invalid and systematically biased is too strong to ignore. Over its first 25 years, JPAE has been a force for good in public affairs education. As JPAE moves into its next 25 years, it should take a principled and evidence-based stand against the use of raw SETs as an important indicator of teaching quality, and should encourage high-quality articles studying other methods of assessing teaching so that we can learn what approaches are better.