Student Evaluations are the Golden Calf of Academia
At the university, student evaluations are idolized, writes lecturer Cor Zonneveld, and that is unjustified. “They are impressive in appearance, but empty in essence.”
When the Hebrews grew restless in the desert, they fashioned a golden calf to worship. It was not God, but it glittered, and that was enough. In today’s universities, the golden calf is called the student evaluation. It shines in its simplicity: a few numbers on a Likert scale, a handful of comments, an aura of “student voice.” Administrators bow before it. Promotions, contracts, even reputations are touched by its glow. But like the calf in the desert, it is an idol: impressive in appearance, empty in truth.
That does not mean evaluations are worthless. When scores plummet across the board, something is wrong. A teacher who loses all connection with a classroom needs support to improve their teaching. The problem is not with the existence of evaluations, but with the reverence they receive. Universities pretend they are measures of course and teaching quality, when in reality they are nothing of the kind.
Students are not trained to judge education by pedagogical principles, and it is unfair to expect them to. Their evaluations measure impressions: Was the lecturer entertaining? Was everything spelled out clearly enough that I didn’t have to struggle? Did the workload feel light? These responses reveal more about short-term comfort than long-term learning. The course that demands real intellectual effort — and therefore feels confusing or even frustrating in the moment — may be precisely the one that transforms a student’s way of thinking. Yet such effects never appear in an evaluation form.
And so student evaluations function less as a mirror of course and teaching quality and more as a customer-satisfaction inquiry. They reward smooth performance and hand-holding. They punish accents, unconventional teaching styles, or material that refuses to yield without effort. Divergent opinions cancel one another out, generating noise rather than signal. Anonymous responses open the door to rants that wound but do not instruct. For all the administrative faith invested in them, student evaluations tell us little about whether education was truly good.
Still, universities continue to worship them. Why? Because they are easy. Numbers can be stored in spreadsheets, compared across years, turned into neat dashboards. It looks like accountability, but it is an empty ritual: performed with solemnity, yet producing nothing real. It spares universities from the harder task of developing genuine ways to evaluate teaching.
Teaching deserves better. If universities truly valued it, they would invest in meaningful evaluation: peer observation, teaching portfolios, longitudinal studies of learning outcomes. These are slower, costlier, and messier — but also real. Instead, the golden calf remains on its pedestal, admired for its shine while everyone knows it has no divine power.
In the biblical story, Moses descends from the mountain, sees the idol, and smashes it to pieces. That, too, is a lesson for us. The time has come to shatter the golden calf of student evaluations. Use them as an alarm bell when they crash, but stop pretending they are a compass for course quality. As long as we worship them, we remain lost in the desert, circling around an idol instead of walking toward the promised land of better education.
Cor Zonneveld is a biologist and lecturer at AUC.
