GMAT Essays (AWA)

ESSAY QUESTION:
"The mission of a university is to educate its students. Therefore, a professor's pay and promotions should be based primarily on students' evaluations of his or her courses."

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

YOUR RESPONSE:
According to the author,the mission of an university is to educate its students and the pay and promotions of the teachers should be based on the evaluation by the students. However, there are several reasons why this opinion won't hold in real circumstances. I will be refuting the opinion in the below analysis of this issue.

One reason for disagreeing with the opinion is that the the professor's pay would be judged entirely be the students' evaluation. This can cause an unfair disadvantage to some deserving professors while this can cause an unfair advantage to some undeserving professors. For example, consider two courses, history and Physics, being thought in a particular college. History, being a popular subject, has many takers while Physics has only a handful. The pay and promotion of the history professor would depend on the evaluation of a greater number of people where as the promotion and pay of the physics teacher could be on the evaluation of a handful of them. If the subject taught is a popular choice, then the chances of getting a fair decision is more. However, if the subject is not a popular one, then the evaluation becomes unfair. As a result, the professor concentrates more on pleasing the students rather than educating them.

Another reason is that strict teachers are more likely to get a poor pay and lose out on promotion. They lose out because they are strict and not because they don't have sufficient knowledge to handle a class. Personal problems with a particular class tends to cause a slump in the pay of the professor. On the other hand, Lenient professors are more likely to get a better pay because they don't tax the students. This causes the students to have an inherent partiality to the lenient professor. This results in better evaluations for Lenient professors rather than strict ones. This would not help, in any case, the mission of the university to educate the students. Moreover, it would only cause a decrease in the quality of education in the university.

Finally, the most important point of contention would be that positive evaluation of professors by students alone do not ensure the mission of education of its students. Other infrastructure facilities like Laboratories, Field Visits, buildings etc must be present in the university in order to provide education to the students. Unless these basic conditions are satisfied, the opinion would not hold true.

Therefore, even though the opinion in the stimulus works to be true in certain conditions, it is clear that evaluation by students should not be the sole basis on which the professors' pay and promotions are determined. There should be a more effective way for evaluating the professor's performance.