Students at the University of Pittsburgh may have their comments removed from their evaluations of the class and of the professor because of a new policy, reports The College Fix.
The university’s Office of Measurement and Evaluation of Teaching says that faculty can petition for comments to be removed from the evaluations if they do not like it. A panel containing faculty, students, and teaching consultants will review the comments to determine whether it should be taken down.
The comments that can be called into question vary from “incendiary and harmful” regarding race and gender to those that are just “negative” or “unactionable.”
Matt Lamb, associate editor of The College Fix, explained to AFN what this policy entails.
"The faculty at the University of Pittsburgh will now be able to petition to have the school remove negative or harmful comments from student evaluations, which raises some free speech concerns,” informs Lamb,” because the university's effectively creating a forum for feedback but then allowing certain student comments to be deleted from the evaluations."
He explained that the university always has the power to take a variety of sources into account when it is considering a professor's level of skill at teaching.
"I don't think student evaluations alone are the best tool because, certainly, they can encourage things like grade inflation,” states Lamb. “However, it does seem misleading to me to tell students that they want to hear their feedback but then say very broadly that they'll get rid of anything — they could get rid of anything that's negative or harmful."
Lamb said that, if the university is going to "broadly delete" any negative comment, then they may as well get rid of surveys.
"Because there's really no point in asking the students for evaluations if all they're looking for is fawning praise," says Lamb.
