Considerable work has been done on student evaluation of teaching/teachers, but reservations remain about its use for summative purposes. Student ratings are not universally accepted as being reliable, nor can they provide really meaningful information. Qualitative comments can provide a better understanding but they tend not to be user-friendly…

In order to determine how situational variables influence students when they evaluate an instructor, the individual student as the unit of analysis was used. Interactions between three variables related to class (type, level, and size) and three related to instructor (reputation, rank, and sex) were examined. (Author/MLW)