A curious case of the phantom professor: mindless teaching evaluations by medical students

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) inform faculty promotion decisions and course improvement, a process that is predicated on the assumption that students complete the evaluations with diligence. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this may not be so.

We sought to determine the degree to which medical students complete SETs deliberately in a classroom-style, multi-instructor course.

We inserted one fictitious lecturer into each of two pre-clinical courses. Students were required to submit their anonymous ratings of all lecturers, including the fictitious one, within 2 weeks after the course using a 5-point Likert scale, but could choose not to evaluate a lecturer. The following year, we repeated this but included a portrait of the fictitious lecturer. The number of actual lecturers in each course ranged from 23 to 52.

Response rates were 99% and 94%, respectively, in the 2 years of the study. Without a portrait, 66% (183 of 277) of students evaluated the fictitious lecturer, but fewer students (49%, 140 of 285) did so with a portrait (chi-squared test, p < 0.0001).

These findings suggest that many medical students complete SETs mindlessly, even when a photograph is included, without careful consideration of whom they are evaluating and much less of how that faculty member performed. This hampers programme quality improvement and may harm the academic advancement of faculty members. We present a framework that suggests a fundamentally different approach to SET that involves students prospectively and proactively.