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<p>Well, I know there’s a popular mythology about this, but actually, no, I don’t agree—not as a general across-the-board proposition. I think this is something that varies quite considerably from university to university, and within universities it varies from school to school and and discipline to discipline. I’ve been on faculties that care a great deal about teaching and have denied tenure to promising scholars who, based on student evaluations and classroom visits by experienced colleagues, were judged not to be good classroom teachers. I’ve been on other faculties where classroom teaching is a distinctly secondary consideration, if any at all. (And guess what: the one where it was least valued was an Ivy). I do think it’s fair to say that at any major research university, one’s prospects of getting tenure without a very strong portfolio of scholarship are virtually nil. But whether teaching receives equal weight is something that, in my experience, differs a great deal from school to school. </p>
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<p>I would agree that PA scores do not directly measure the quality of classroom instruction. Nothing else in the US News ranking does, either, nor have I yet heard a plausible proposal for how to measure this. The problem I have with scrapping the PA (which I do not think is idealk in its present form, by the way) is that it is the only element in the entire US News ranknig system that has ANYTHING to do with faculty quality on any level. And the idea that a ranking system could have anything useful to say about the quality of a college or university without saying something about the quality of the faculty is to my mind wildly preposterous.</p>
<p>A couple more quick points. The inability to come up with clear measures of teaching effectiveness is a problem that goes well beyond US News. It’s one of the major reasons many people in academia feel they can’t really evaluate teaching in tenure and promotion decisions. Teaching goes on behind closed doors, there are reasons not to place excessive weight on student evaluations, and class visits by colleagues present at best a one-time “snapshot” that may or may not be representative of the teacher’s overall performance. It’s just not “public” in the way scholarship is. I personally don’t think it’s that hard to evaluate teaching in the tenure-and-promotion context; yes, the data is limited, but it can at least weed out the egregious cases. But for inter-university comparisons? I just don’t see it. </p>
<p>As for the “typical undergraduate’s satisfaction with his/her experience in the classroom”—well, that’s something prospective students might want to know for its own sake, but it’s not necessarily an accurate measurement of teaching quality, either. I’ve read enough student evaluations and observed enough of my colleagues in the classroom over the years to know that the teacher with charisma, charm, good looks, and a razor-sharp wit will win out in student evaluations over his more formal or reserved colleague every time—even if what’s being taught by the charmer lacks the depth, heft, subtlety, and nuance of his less charming colleague. Easy graders almost invariably get high marks from students. Individual faculty members who have taught two versions of the same course—one demanding, one dumbed-down—have invariably reported they get higher marks from their students in the dumbed-down version; some have even won tenure after intentionally dumbing down their courses to boost their student evaluations. One study showed an almost perfect correlation between student responses as to how “likeable” they found a professor five minutes into the first lecture, and how they ultimately rated the course in their end-of-semester evaluations—suggesting that student evaluations have less to do with learning that may or may not occur over the course of a semester than with the entertainment value of the experience. So this sort of “student as consumer” data must be taken with a huge grain of salt if we’re trying to get at the effectiveness or quality of the teaching—which may indeed be something many students don’t care all that much about. As a teacher, however, I feel a responsibility to try my best to really teach, not simply to entertain. and as a parent of a soon-to-be college freshman, I’m more interested in schools that will deliver substance, not merely entertainment.</p>