The use of students as raters of classroom instruction has a long history and an expanding future. The credibility of student ratings seems to be at a high point coinciding with demands for accountability and the rise of a consumer-oriented consciousness. But in the relatively recent past a subtle and vitally important shift from to summative uses of evaluative information from students seems to have been occurring. Up until the middle of the 1960s, the emphasis of almost all research and development activities related to student ratings was on providing formative information to an instructor for the improvement of classroom instruction. The use of the same information in a summative fashion, to guide administrative judgments about promotion or merit salary increases, was less common. In fact, in 1967 Astin and Lee [1] reported that 48 percent of the administrators they surveyed did not consider student ratings at all in their administrative judgments about faculty. Bejor's [2] survey shows the recent comparable figure to be 13 percent, a rather dramatic shift that would be difficult to account for by the different samples of the two surveys alone. Bejor's evidence further documents the increasing importance of student perceptions in the administrative process, since 51 percent of his sample reported that university policy strongly urges or requires the use of (student) ratings by instructors. There is no indication that the trend has peaked. The apparent increase in the credibility and use of students as raters affecting administrative decisions has been sufficient to cause one re-