Student Ratings in a Consumerist Academy: Leveraging Pedagogical Control and Authority

Abstract

This article is a qualitative examination of the impact of consumerism on pedagogical relationships and, in turn, its subsequent significance for standards of excellence in higher education. Based on seventy-five in-depth interviews, students' ratings of faculty are found to be normative assessments of a professor's conformity with students' pedagogical role expectations that have been derived from a market ideology and framed by a transmission model of education embedded in the rating form. When transformed into numbers, student ratings become misconstrued as quantified measures of teaching excellence that institutionally serve to provide an illusion of objectivity and penalize faculty who adhere to an alternative critical model of pedagogy. Through the use of rating forms, academic control and professional authority are transferred from faculty to students, who, as discriminating consumers, are granted the power to further their own interests and, consequently, shape the nature and form of higher education that serves them.