The Reliability of Students' Ratings of Faculty Teaching Effectiveness

Procedures for measuring faculty teaching effectiveness vary by university; however, student eval uations typically are considered in the process and are critical elements of tenure and promotion decisions (Haskell 1997; Marsh 1987). Because of the high corre lation between quality teaching and high student achievement (Darling-Hammond 1997), it is understandable that faculty teaching effectiveness be carefully moni tored. Student evaluations of faculty teaching effectiveness are also used in dispensing merit-based salary increases and can create a competitive climate among faculty members within university colleges and departments. Because of the emphasis placed on student evaluations and the pressure for junior faculty mem bers in particular to receive high ratings to bolster their promotion and tenure doc uments, an examination of the reliability of student evaluations of teaching effec tiveness is warranted. The weight that the student evaluations receive differs across universities and is continually under scrutiny (Haskell 1997; Sproule 2000). Faculty concerns regard ing the use of student-completed evalua tion forms as the sole or most important assessment of teaching quality have been