Why do student satisfaction scores get so much weight in personnel decisions?
This is a complicated question. First, many faculty only present one source of data about teaching: student satisfaction data. Thus, student satisfaction scores become so important because they are the only data. Faculty present only one source of data, student satisfaction, because it is so easy to get. The data are analyzed and even reported by someone else. Second, student satisfaction surveys may be the most researched source of personnel data and the most ubiquitous. Nearly every school in the country collects this information for faculty. The two critical pieces of evidence about any measure, reliability and validity, consistently show that student satisfaction measures are reliable and valid.
