Charles R. Emery

Return to academic standards: a critique of student evaluations of teaching effectiveness

A student evaluation of teaching effectiveness (SETE) is often the most influential information in promotion and tenure decision at colleges and universities focused on teaching. Unfortunately, this instrument often fails to capture the lecturer’s ability to foster the creation of learning and to serve as a tool for improving instruction. In fact, it often serves as a disincentive to introducing rigour. This paper performs a qualitative (e.g. case studies) and quantitative (e.g. empirical research) literature review of student evaluations as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Problems are highlighted and suggestions offered to improve SETEs and to refocus teaching effectiveness on outcome‐based academic standards.

Customers vs. products: adopting an effective approach to business students

Compares the benefits and consequences of two different educational philosophies adopted by business schools: the customer‐oriented approach and the product‐oriented approach. The customer approach suggests that faculty treat the students as their customers and the product approach requires that faculty treat the students as their products. Under a student‐customer program, enrollment and levels of student satisfaction increase at the expense of learning and program quality. The product approach shifts the focus from student satisfaction to student capabilities and holds business programs responsible for producing knowledgeable, effective students who possess skills and talents valued by public and private corporations.

Schoolwork as Products, Professors as Customers: A Practical Teaching Approach in Business Education.

Abstract The common perception is that only hands-on learning can help students understand the interactions between various concepts. In this article, the authors describe a method of teaching the four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion—in a marketing principles course in which the students market their coursework to the professor as the customer. The professor-as-customer paradigm is based on the Japanese Kano model, which identifies and quantifies customer expectations. In a 2-year experiment, they investigated two professors and 357 students and found that progress occurred on several nationally normed learning objectives.