+David Eppstein This is clearly a clueless proposal, but I am always amazed at how little power students have... You'd think they would have the power to choose who they want to study with... After all, if you do not like your physician, you can often find another... Why is it ok to be stuck in a calculus class with a teacher who'd rather be elsewhere?

where do we get these stupid idiots

I am one of those eligible to be voted off the corn field. Sadly, this gentleman is one of my employers.

I wonder why it never occurs to legislators that this should be the job of administrators. That goes for this proposal, and the related kind you often hear about K-12 educators facing.

It should be the job of administrators to oversee efforts to ensure the overall quality and job performance of faculty. If things are so terrible in classrooms, but nothing happens, a Dean should get a lot of heat. For primary and secondary schools, this should be the principal's task.

But often "leaders" look right past the other "leaders" who could be addressing the issue directly... and construct convoluted schemes like this that show a basic lack of understanding about how educational systems are supposed to function.

+Daniel Lemire I recall as an undergraduate being asked to write an actual letter of evaluation for one of my instructors, who was going up for tenure at the time. I think that process can give students a voice in a way that's a little less superficial than just ticking off things on a scale of 1 to 10.

But the bad calculus instructor issue is a separate problem, mostly caused by a system in which mathematics Ph.D.'s sit in a holding pattern of up to ten years in "visiting assistant professor" positions that are really just underpaid and temporary teaching posts. Giving the students a voice in which of these instructors are good and bad won't help because  the instructors don't stay long enough for their evaluations to matter and because it's really the economic system that needs changing, not the individual instructors.

I knew this was a clueless proposal, but the interview with the legislator makes him sound like a total idiot.

If this were implemented, it would be very easy to game the system. Universities would simply have to have one intentionally atrocious instructor on staff, so that this person could be the one to be fired. There could then be a transfer market for such people. It would also be easy to manipulate the system with bribes. Maybe this is the “free market” fantasy the legislator has in mind.

So lazy, underperforming students exact revenge on the "bad" professor who did nothing more than grade them as they deserved. What could possible go wrong?!

Utterly ridiculous! How does a student have the foundation to make a decision like that? Their decisions would be based on whether or not they like the teacher as opposed to whether the teacher is delivering rigorous instruction. This politician needs to stop wasting time and focus on the REAL issues!

Am I really the only person who thinks that all teaching evaluations of all public-university instructors should be public?  The voting-off-the-island aspect of the proposal is clearly ridiculous, but the public shaming aspect absolutely is not.  If your evaluations are really among the ten lowest on campus, your teaching has *serious* issues.

I always read and acted upon student evaluations and feedback to make my course (and me) better. That should be the focus of any evaluation. However, some comments I heard, and ignored; I selected course content carefully, based upon my understanding of what would allow students to grow. They didn't have to like everything we did for it to be valuable, did they? Do we now kowtow to what a student may or may not understand about a professor's curricular decisions? Do professors also have to pass some vague personality test to keep their jobs? Invariably, there will be one or two every year who have an ax to grind: Why empower that? 

+Jeff Erickson, like you, I am a professor at the University of [State] at [Flagship Campus]. Our teaching evaluation summaries are publicly available, although I doubt many students look at them. However, I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to publish the individual evaluations and comments, because they are considered anonymous and confidential. I wouldn't even be allowed to publish them myself.

“Anonymous and confidential” sounds great from the point of view of the student, but on the flip side, it makes it impossible for anybody else to check whether I even look at the comments.

Adam Smith suggested how to deal with this 200 years ago.  Now we can do it electronically.  Give the students a type of debit card.  Let the teachers announce what they will teach when and where.  The students use the cards to pay for each class.  Good teachers get more money assuming students want to learn.

Separate teaching from testing and grading so teachers can't bribe students with grades.  Bad teachers could not make a living.

“Assuming students want to learn”, +Karl Smithe. Unfortunately, this isn't a very good approximation of reality. What they typically want in practice is to get good grades without having to work too hard.

+Richard Green   I get the impression that the problem starts in grade school.  Looking back my teachers seemed to work at making learning boring.  But I discovered science fiction in 4th grade.  Consequently I started teaching myself things that the teachers never mentioned.

That is why I find it so curious and disturbing that our so called teachers have not even suggested a National Recommended Reading List in all of these decades.  They turn learning into boring WORK for Grades to be competed for.  Most of the teachers I asked at a high school said they had never heard of Project Gutenberg.

Is memorizing how to spell ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM more important than understanding FUSION?  So now people argue about Global Warming without most comprehending the physics and politicians are too stupid to listen to.

People Conservatives are an endless well of bad ideas.

Conservatives don't have a corner on that market by any means.

+Richard Green Evaluations at my university are anonymous by design — students fill out actual paper forms and are not asked for any identifying information.  In principle, the original handwritten comments might be used to identify students, but it's hard to see how publishing plain-text transcriptions of comments about your course would be illegal, especially if you told the students in advance.

When I was an undergrad, a statistical summary of teaching evaluations of every course from the previous semester, including transcribed narrative comments, was available as a big fat bound printout on the desk at the registrar's office. Every semester the student newspaper would publish the course numbers and instructor names for the ten highest and ten lowest average scores.  It was brilliant.

Berkeley EECS avoids confidentiality issues by having the entire evaluation system handled by students, rather than by the university: https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/coursesurveys

+Jeff Erickson, perhaps it wouldn't be illegal, but I would expect it to cause some kind of trouble.

Other universities that I've worked at have been less interested in confidentiality and more interested in publishing transcribed comments.

One university I worked at required us (the faculty) to tabulate our own ratings and summarise the comments ourselves. The results would be posted publicly on a department bulletin board.

I have a wonderful idea suggested by this lawmakers initiative: The idea would require the state’s voters to rate lawmakers’ performance based solely on their’ evaluations of their lawmaking effectiveness. Lawmakers whose evaluation scores didn’t reach a minimum threshold would be automatically fired by the state.

Then comes the competition. The names of the five lawmakers with the lowest ratings above the minimum threshold would be published online. Voters would then vote on those lawmakers’ future employment — and the lawmaker with the fewest votes would be fired, regardless of election term status.

Best Idea I've heard in a long time, good for you