Not that surprising. Professors like keeping their jobs too.

George Leef writes at Minding the Campus.

Student Ratings Bait Profs Into Lowering Standards

In the fall of 1980, towards the end of my first semester of college teaching, I received a memo saying that on the last day of class I was to hand out the course evaluation forms for students to complete and return.

A few weeks later, the packet of forms they had filled out was stuffed in my mail box. I read through them and was not surprised to find that most of the students who had done reasonably well had rated the course highly and, naturally, that most of those who had done poorly said it was terrible. Some of the comments from students in the latter group were scathing.

In quite a few instances, I wondered, “How would you know the course was so awful – you hardly ever showed up.”

‘Keep ‘em Happy’

By my second year of teaching, I had decided that the freshman and sophomores I taught had nothing useful to say. The evaluations were just a measure of popularity. I didn’t waste time reading them.

Quite a few years later, when I started doing think-tank work on higher education, one of the first books I came across was Generation X Goes to College by Peter Sacks. In his book, Sacks (who frequently writes for Minding the Campus), discussed his first year of teaching journalism at an unnamed but clearly non-selective college. He wanted to teach an academically strong course and demanded quite a lot of writing from his students, all of which he carefully critiqued.