Websites such as RateMyProfessors.com grant students the freedom to unleash their impressions of professors and TAs into the wild world of the Internet. Missing from recent discussion of these websites, however, is an important question: just how valid are student evaluations, anyway?

In 2003, Valen Johnson, currently a biostatistics professor at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, published a book entitled "Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education." Using statistical studies, he asserted that grade inflation plagues American higher education and that student evaluations are counter-productive.

"The student course evaluations or student evaluations don't accomplish what they set out to do," Mr. Johnson told me over the phone. "They're inaccurate measures of how much students have learned."

In his studies, Mr. Johnson found that students award rave reviews to professors and TAs who give them good grades. When students don't get the grades they desire, they blame their instructors and write negative reviews. Thus, instructors without tenure are more likely to give easy A's in hopes of bettering their careers, and this process, Mr. Johnson argues, punishes faculty members who give grades that accurately measure students' performances.

Students in general are seduced by lectures that are entertaining but devoid of content. Mr. Johnson described the "Fox effect" in his book, referring to an experiment in which various groups of people — including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, mental-health educators, administrators and educators — watched a witty lecture titled "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physical Education" presented by the prestigious Dr. Myron L. Fox, "an authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior." All gave the presentation excellent reviews and agreed that Dr. Fox had stimulated their interest in the topic.

In reality, however, Mr. Johnson explains, "Dr. Myron Fox did not hold an advanced degree in any subject and was not an expert in mathematics, game theory, or behavioral sciences. … Dr. Fox was a professional actor who had been hired to present a content-free lecture filled with 'double-talk, neologisms, non sequiturs and contradictory statements."

Ouch. Ignorance is bliss.

"There's this assumption that students know what they should be learning in a course," Mr. Johnson observed, noting that students don't often know just what they got out of a course until years later. (As we fumble our way through some classes, this offers hope.)

There is no question that if a faculty member is really out of line, unhelpful or incompetent, students should be able to speak up. But are anonymous evaluations the way to go? Anonymous forums tend to generate volumes of irrelevant spew or gushing.

"Individual reports of students to department chairs and deans is the best way to do it," Mr. Johnson said, adding that it's usually fairly obvious when a faculty member is incompetent. "If you have a serious complaint about a faculty member, it shouldn't be anonymous. The faculty member should be able to respond."

Some instructors value student evaluations highly. Monica Seger, a UW Italian TA, said most of the TAs she knows take evaluations very seriously — possibly more so than tenured professors. "I definitely read my student evaluations as soon as they're available," she said. "It's a tricky issue. I think it's true that it's important to be liked by students as a young teacher. On the one hand, it is sort of counter-productive. … [But] feedback is really important, especially if you're new and inexperienced."

Yet truly thoughtful commentary is hard to come by in student evaluations, which are usually dashed off in haste on Scantrons.

At the end of the semester, I know I'll be asked to fill out evaluation questionnaires. But as my classmates' chairs screech after a few lines of chicken scratch, I'll wonder if it was even worth it.

Cynthia Martens ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in Italian and European studies.