Social Injustice In Higher Education

Ethics and Social Injustice of Student Evaluation Assessments in Higher Education

Student evaluations are regularly used in higher education to evaluate faculty. Whether this is promotion, tenure, or contract extension, these assessments have become a large part of faculty employment. Is this ethical to provide an assessment to teenagers and young adults to jeopardize faculty job security or loss of tenure? Are evaluations used as a tool or a means to an end? Several articles have provided how faculty perceive student evaluations. Ethically, these articles provide a vision of how these student evaluations can be very detrimental to faculty and their careers along with how these assessments can be bias and give a social injustice to certain …show more content…
They argue that the move towards a “student as the customer” has led to universities having to inflate grades along with weakening their courses to be able to gain a stronger student or “customer” satisfaction to be competitive in the ever-evolving atmosphere in higher education. Simpson and Siguaw argue that using these evaluations for assessment of teaching and learning actually have no ethical warrant of these two topics. Instead, students value these evaluations as a way to provide ratings on attractiveness, gender, or age of the faculty member. Huemer also provides an explanation of this concept as what he calls the “Dr. Fox Effect” (HUEMER CITE). In this study a professional actor was hired to provide a lecture to students by the code name Dr. Myron Fox who was an expert in the application of Mathematics to human behavior. The students were asked to rate the lecture, which they all indicated that Dr. Fox was a great instructor who received very high positive ratings. How ethical is this that students are basing superficial characteristics on faculty assessment? As Huemer provides, the ratings of instructors are not based on what the instructor said in class, the material that was covered, or the assignments or tests, but rather personality traits. These authors provide reasoning behind why ethically it is very concerning to use …show more content…
For example, Bascow explains that when personality traits are controlled, male professors are rated higher than female professors from male students. When these personality traits are not controlled, male students rate female professors higher than male professors. The gap from this explains what? Male students are basing faculty evaluations on female professor’s personality rather than their actual teaching habits and rigor. Can this be bias? Yes. Can this be social unjust? Yes. This leaves a large gap as to what needs to be done for improving these ethical principles within student evaluations. Concepts that have been used to reduce bias have been to use faculty-developed evaluation instruments suited to specific departments and purpose of the course (GORDRON CITE). This has been adopted by North Carolina State University who has mandated this type of evaluation to prevent bias and unethical calculations of faculty (GORDON CITE). Female or male professors should not be judged on their gender, but by their teaching directive and development of the course. Most of the studies provided high percentages of student evaluations were based on personality, years of age the professor had, and the years of teaching experience. The gaps we see in these studies are present with external factors. Ethically, students decisions about faculty may be attributed to