(In a sense, I guess the whole thing is optional - after all, it is anonymous, and we don't check that every student has filled the whole thing out. It also switched from in-class to an online form during the time I was teaching, and the response rate went down quite a bit as a result, but this was after the situation I mentioned above.)
It must've been a frustrating experience.
At the same time - you're making a very broad statement here based on a rather personal experience. You went from a certain regimen yielding certain results, to a different regimen yielding different results. There are way too many parameters here to draw conclusions.
In speaking with other grad students this seemed to be a well-known phenomenon, to the point that most other grad students intentionally didn't put much time into their teaching and basked in the positive reviews as a result. It was suggested many times to me that I was spending too much time thinking about my teaching. In my case, the lax teaching was not intentional, I simply was overcommitted that semester and had less time to prepare.
Not only do such institutions seemed to be concerned about cancerously growing credentialism, they’ve embraced it as a money money making scheme. See e.g. the explosion of terminal masters programs.
You reap what you sow.
I'm not sure how this statement addresses my claims.
How do we measure/quantify the quality of education? I claim that the way students feel about the staff and the institution should be taken into account, rather than dismissed.
If colleges, and those that work at them, want to be in the education business rather than the credential selling business they ought to take a good long look at where and how they went wrong instead of constantly trying to push the blame onto to people that, again, are just buying what they are selling.