The Place of Student Feedback in Teaching Evaluation

Under this assumption, a faculty member who receives a mean score of 4.35 is a better teacher than a faculty member who receives a score of 4.25. Willie Tan’s study of SF scores in the article, “Determinants of Student Feedback Scores” shows that this assumption is flawed. There are many other numerically quantifiable variables, such as class size, perceived difficulty level, expected grades, and so on, which influence the SF scores. And there may be other factors that have not been taken into consideration but may influence the scores, many of which may not lend themselves to numerical coding for statistical investigation. These considerations lead us to question the validity of the operationalization of teaching quality as SF scores: the concrete property we measure may not truly reflect the abstract quality we want to evaluate.