Via James Joyner comes news that Texas A&M is going to start giving $10,000 bonuses to professors who get good student evaluations. The article, of course, comes along with a lot of caterwauling about how unreliable student evaluations are as a tool for instructor assessment. I'd be sympathetic except for one thing: I grew up among academics. And I have never since met a class of people so contemptuous of teaching. You'd think they were being asked to chew mud. In part, that's a structure of the rewards system. Teaching takes a lot of time but doesn't play a big role in tenure or promotion. Which is why Texas's maneuver makes sense. The question is not whether the evaluations will offer a perfect analysis of teaching skill but whether attaching $10,000 to them creates some real incentive for professors to take teaching seriously. Right now, few professors stand to gain from teaching well. As such, they don't teach well. Efforts to change that sorry state of affairs should be welcomed.
