If Student Evaluations of Teaching Are Invalid, Why Are They Still Being Used? Comments on Uttl (2023)

After a brief summary of Uttl’s devastating conclusions about the quality of research on student evaluation of teaching (SET) and the (in-)validity of SETs as a measure of teaching effectiveness, I give a brief historical overview on how this misuse of SETs developed, despite a warning against such use by one of the SET developers. I then present a process model of the biasing effect of SETs on teaching quality and grades and discuss the evidence that supports this model. In my last section, I discuss a most puzzling question, namely why SETs are still being widely used despite overwhelming evidence of their lack of validity.