Sometimes students have legitimate complaints about teaching: Gooblar

“We may not want to think of our students as customers, but they are paying for their courses. Shouldn’t they have some control over their choices?” asks David Gooblar for Chronicle Vitae. The author argues that while it is crucial that professors maintain their power to decide how they teach their classes, they still face an ethical obligation to justify their decisions to their students. Gooblar notes that in many instances, professors will discount student complaints as mere excuses for a poor performance. Yet “if our mission is to help them develop,” Gooblar concludes, “then the students themselves have to be an important source of feedback. They may not be completely reliable judges of their own learning, but clearly they know how they’re experiencing something better than anyone else.” Chronicle Vitae