While I think it's true that the article overemphasized the weight placed on student evaluations somewhat, I think this does get to the real problem. There's no

While I think it's true that the article overemphasized the weight placed on student evaluations somewhat, I think this does get to the real problem. There's nothing wrong with students evaluating instructors. The problem comes when this is the only method used to evaluate teaching effectiveness. I'm a newly appointed professor, but I've heard many stories from colleagues in the past about students thanking them for being demanding in their course as what they learned was helpful in the future. Demanding classes tend to have negative impact on student evaluations, but that's obviously not capturing the whole picture.