Student Ratings of Instruction: True or False

Introduction. Students' evaluation of teaching is a major concern in higher education. In this regard, during the past 30 years hundreds of papers have been published which because of various grounds from valid, reliable to useless, such papers cannot be easily summarized. The present study investigated for two purposes, first was to out line opinions of two groups of advocates and opposites about validity and reliability of SET. The second purpose was to represent conceptual fallacies at SET process. Methods. This study was a library research of original and review papers over SET. In this regard from one thousand papers, two hundreds were chosen randomly, then the information were collected and analyzed comparatively. Results. Findings showed that SET advocates believed that students have a metacognition, so they have a valid judgment through SET but opposites stated that student’s judgments are subjective, so they are not valid. The first group (advocates) say that SET is reliable because of correlation between SET of current students and alumni, more over similarity of SET results of one teacher through years, that research has indicated. On the other hand advocates say that SET reliability is affected by educational contexts, student characteristics, teacher characteristics and course characteristics. Conceptual fallacies at SET are : (a) that students are the only reliable information source (b) the existence of a unique and immutable metric term: “ teaching effectiveness” , and (c) opinion is a fact. Conclusion. Findings indicated that SET is not reliable and documentary as a sole source for teacher evaluation , so we must apply other approaches of evaluation as complementary. These approaches must aggregate measures of teaching performance to reflect items within professors’ control but conceptual fallacies can not be remedied .