The relative importance of teaching evaluation criteria from the points of view of students and faculty

The student evaluation of teaching (SET) tool is widely used to measure student satisfaction in institutions of higher education. A SET typically includes several criteria, which are assigned equal weights. The motivation for this research is to examine student and lecturer perceptions and the behaviour of the students (i.e. ratings given by them to lecturers) of various criteria on a SET. To this end, an analytic hierarchy process methodology was used to capture the importance (weights) of SET criteria from the points of view of students and lecturers; the students' actual ratings on the SET were then analysed. Results revealed statistically significant differences in the weights of the SET criteria; those weights differ for students and lecturers. However, analysis of 1436 SET forms of the same population revealed that, although students typically rate instructors very similarly on all criteria, they rate instructors higher on the criteria that are more important to them. The practical implications of this research is the reduction of the number of criteria on the SETs used for personnel decisions, while identifying for instructors and administrators those criteria that are perceived by students to be more important.