Spoiler alert: you can’t tell how well the students actually learned in your course. While feedback on your course evaluations will be helpful to understand the student experience, a recently published meta-analysis found no correlation between student evaluations of teaching (SETs) and later performance, and actually a negative correlation after grade controls. When schools connected contract renewal to SETs, there was evidence of grade inflation by those instructors. SETs can provide valuable information about the experience of your learners, but students are often poor judges of their own learning and often score the courses that engage them in the productive struggle of learning lower.
Would you like help in understanding the implications of your SETs for course design? Reach out to umpi-ctl@maine.edu to schedule a discussion.
Read the full article online:
Sixbert Sangwa, & Nsabiyumva, S. (2025). Student evaluations of teaching fail to predict learning: Meta-analysis of bias, grade inflation, and incentive distortion in higher education. [Preprint] https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.24180.41600