This is kind of sticking with the “Journal of Unsurprising Results” theme, but Inside Higher Ed today reports on a new study of student evaluations finding, well, more or less what you would expect:
One explanation could be that good students are earning good grades, and crediting their good professors for their learning. The Ohio State study, however, provides evidence for the more cynical/realistic interpretation — namely that professors who are easy (and aren’t necessarily the best teachers) earn good ratings. The way the Ohio State team did this was to look at grades in subsequent classes that would have relied on the learning in the class in which the students’ evaluations were studied. Their finding: no correlation between professor evaluations and the learning that is actually taking place.
There are some problems with this approach– subsequent classes will involve new material as well as old, and it’s possible that students can get lousy grades because of problems with the new stuff, rather than deficiencies in their background. It’s not worth five bucks to me to see whether they tried to control for this, though.