How should faculty in higher education be evaluated? Fully describe procedures and processes that you believe to be the most effective and fair ways to evaluate higher education faculty?

How should faculty in higher education be evaluated?

Evaluation of higher education faculty is a challenging and complex task. Unlike high school teachers, the higher education faculty is responsible for high level learning outcomes which students can use to fit themselves into jobs and research. Another challenge in higher education faculty evaluations is that curriculum varies from institution to institution and there is no one common standardized exam format to assess the outcome of the students taught by higher education faculty. As a common practice, higher education faculty is evaluated by their students and their peers which is subject to bias.

In my view, the more efficient way to assess and evaluate higher education faculty is to use a mix of methods which measure their effectiveness in several different aspects. For example, collecting data on the number and quality of research publications by students in the studied course shows the effectiveness of a teacher in a research focused course. Similarly, number of placements in relevant industry (job/internships) shows the effectiveness of a teacher in teaching that relevant subject. To evaluate the teachers’ effectiveness in impacting students’ learning, students’ surveys must be conducted anonymously to make the information more reliable and unbiased. Peer evaluation is also important to have a reflection from experts in the same area. However, none of these methods will work perfectly if used alone. Therefore, the higher education faculty evaluation must include all these aspects of evaluation in order for the evaluation to be predictive of teachers’ effectiveness and efficiency. Depending upon the mission of the educational program, different weightages can be given to different evaluation criteria.