Stability of Student Evaluations of Instructors and Their Courses with Implications for Validity

Abstract

A course-instructor evaluation form was administered to 775 undergraduates in 15 large and small section introductory courses after the second class meeting and again near the end of the semester. The median pretest posttest correlation was +.60. Students were generally more negative toward their course and instructor at the end of the semester than they were at the beginning. As a separate portion of this project, two instructors deliberately attempted to alter their students' evaluation in one of two large sections of their introductory psychology course. In both cases, there was a significant overall mean difference between the experimental and control groups on the initial evaluation but there was no difference on the end-of-semester evaluation. The results of this study indicated that although students quickly form reasonably lasting judgments of their instructors and courses they are also able to alter their judgments as warranted by changing situations. These findings appear to provide support for the validity of student evaluations.