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.

MY RESPONSE

The issue of improving educational techniques and creating innovative student learning, which has aroused a controversial debate, is an interesting one especially in the era of globalization. The stance that a professor's pay and promotions be based on student evaluations of her/his courses , may seem legitimate and many might even be convinced by this stance. However when juxtaposed with the fact that educators must be paid by the contribution the make to learning through their research rather than by student evaluation of their courses , the stance's flaws become evident. The second proposal has several advantages over the stance that the argument propagates as it does not suffer from the flaws and better addresses the issue at hand by actually enabling professors to educate generations of students by conducting new research and actually increasing the knowledge of their field of study.

Firstly, a professor primary duty must be that of a researcher not a teacher. As it is only via innovative research that the epistemology of any discipline is enhanced. If professor's pay and promotions were based on student evaluations then their motivation to further the knowledge of their field would greatly suffer and therefore they would be unable to make an effective contribution to their field.

Furthermore, a professor might be an excellent teacher but majority of student might not find his subject matter attractive. Therefore, her/his pay and promotions if based on students' evaluations of his or her courses would end up being on how popular that particular professor is with his/her students. Therefore, his pay and promotions merely end up being based on a popularity contest rather than an effective gauge his/ her performance in his/her field of study.

The author's stance might have been supported and perhaps even difficult to refute had she/he addressed the aforementioned criteria. But in its current state this stance suffers from a number of flaws. The alternative stance that a professor's pay be based on his contribution to her/his field of study via research serves as a better resolution to the issue at it clear fiils the gaps in reasoning that the author's stance had and offers a holistic solution to the issue at hand.