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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Teachers should be judged based on student evaluations - but those evaluations should be deferred until, oh, 10 years later when students can honestly and dispassionately answer the question: "did that teacher enrich my life, prepare me for the livelihood I'm actually earning today?"

Of course, administrations can't wait 10 years for feedback, more's the pity.

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Even deferring feedback by a couple of years would make a difference - and as institutions that can afford long-term investments (my university, for instance, licenses some of its buildings to government on century leases,) it doesn't seem like there's any huge hurry.

Or perhaps restructuring their courses so that there's more practical work - perhaps working closely with companies in the area with internship schemes - to allow for more accurate in course feedback.

Or getting feedback from other teachers in the domain - that would be imperfect but I suspect might still be better than asking the students, assuming that the teachers were generally trustworthy folks.

Or doing, optional, follow up quizzes on the material taught... six months down the line and paying the students £20 each to do so - that would at least help to assess retained material (though not the worth of that material itself I suppose.)

Not to mention I'm not going to remember any of my professors in 10 years.

You might be surprised. The teachers that taught you relevant things that you end up using over and over tend to be remembered in my experience.

Of course some courses lend themselves to imparting this information better than others, and if you end up in fields other than your major there may be less chances to find your learning useful.

But then you are evaluating class he was assigned to teach and its relevance to your career, not his teaching. I did not used whatever I learned about networking or cryptography much, but that does not mean those teachers were bad. Nor does it mean CS major should not contain those classes.

So those people will only get the feedback from the people who went on to use their knowledge. That sounds fair enough to me. :/

The ones you wouldn't remember probably weren't sufficiently different from the mean to warrant a positive or negative score in the first place. Meanwhile, the ones that you do remember probably were.

Just make opting out of each individual question easy (add a N/A or "don't remember" option). Sure, you'll collect less data, but I imagine that you'll get at least partial cancellation after multiplication by the SNR, possibly much more than partial cancellation.

Oh trust me, you do.

Not all of them, no. Of course not.

But you remember the great ones, and you remember the god damned awful ones. The great leave an emotional mark on you, they inspired you to go into their field, they showed you something that wowed you and has stuck with you over those 10 years. And the damned awful ones leave emotional scars that don't fade, and you'll talk to old veterans/classmates about them like you did a tour of 'Nam together...

Student feedback should be valued for sure, but there has to be another way to evaluate a teacher's skills and ability to impart lasting knowledge.

And as a result of these evaluations coming too soon teaching becomes a popularity contest.

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