Should students be allowed to give good teachers a bonus?

This study from the United States Air Force Academy found that there is a trade-off between performance on the immediate test and deep understanding of the material. Student evaluation of teacher performance is correlated to how well they perform on the immediate test more than it is correlated to how well they developed a deep understanding of the material. In this way, student evaluation of a teacher can be inversely correlated to the quality of the education they receive.

Regardless of how these effects may operate, our results show that student evaluations reward professors who increase achievement in the contemporaneous course being taught, not those who increase deep learning. Using our various measures of teacher quality to rank-order teachers leads to profoundly different results. Since many U.S. colleges and universities use student evaluations as a measurement of teaching quality for academic promotion and tenure decisions, this finding draws into question the value and accuracy of this practice.

Students are the consumers of the product

This is only partly true. Employers and others also have skin in the game. There has been some research suggesting that grade inflation, which reduces the information content of grades, is in part due to the role that student assessment play in academic career prospects. Students rate soft markers more highly.

This is an example of using a metric (for teacher quality) that is imperfect, which then results in distortions.

1. this advantages teachers with larger classes.
2. as proposed, this is a relative ranking. With all the loss of team spirit that implies
3. it's a very weak signal, especially on the "above average" side.

Where does the money come from? I presume this (plus some administrative overhead cost) gets tacked onto tuition, I think it probably won't be popular with students.  Also, from the college profs I know, the current level of feedback and student-ratings is ALREADY fairly disruptive to the ability to hold high standards in curriculum, and this would seem to make it a lot worse.

Students are the consumers of the product schools are selling.

This is incorrect.  Future employers are the primary consumers of both the credentials and the knowledge/abilities imparted to the students.  Taxpayers and students (in rather differing ratio based on type of college) are the main purchasers.  

This would be an interesting idea if combined with income-share agreements (where a student gives a % of future income rather than (or in addition to a lower) fixed price for school).  Allow the students to allocate some amount of their loan repayment or income-withholding, long after graduation, to teachers or departments they feel were most beneficial to them.  

My second-favorite teacher in undergrad was relatively unpopular because he taught very difficult classes, at least some of which were required to graduate.

Teachers might be afraid that they're being given a pay cut that they have to "placate students" to get back. This fear could be alleviated by adding a $5 fee per class. Present teacher pay is unchanged. The SAB is truly a bonus - a pure increase in pay - for teachers who earn it.

I don't think this is how market wages work. If it is known that the average teacher gets a $100 bonus, the school will offer $100 less in base pay than it would otherwise.

Maybe not right now, when the change is introduced. But in the following years, the wages will raise slower than they would otherwise, until the balance is achieved.

Currently, they can only express their opinion before trying out a teacher's offering

Most universitites have already systems where students evaluate their teachers at the end of the year and the scores do figure into administrative decisions of the university. 

This effect is already strong enough to get undesireable effects like grade inflation that happens when teachers focus on being liked by students.

In 2007 I wrote an article for Inside Higher Ed advocating that "institutions should empower graduating seniors to reward teaching excellence. Colleges should do this by giving each graduating senior $1,000 to distribute among their faculty. Colleges should have graduates use a computer program to distribute their allocations anonymously."

https://insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/07/beyond-merit-pay-and-student-evaluations

Excellent objections, commenters. It sounds like the overall reaction is "this incentivizes grade inflation, likeability, packed classes, and easiness - not quality teaching." I like waveman's point that graduate schools, employers, governments, and others have skin in the game as well.

And of course, the changes I'd like to see aren't going to be achieved by handing out petty cash here and there.

In my local community college, the main things I miss are well-designed curriculums and good teachers. It's just too spotty. Some teachers are angels, and some are just stinkers. Some curriculums are delightful, and others have gigantic flaws that make a class into 12 weeks of misery.

As a student, becoming intimately familiar with each and every flaw, it's easy to get the sense that "if this is how bad it is, this teacher/department must just not care about the experience of their students. They're getting paid the same whether or not they offer a quality class. Students aren't going to just quit if they get hit with a nasty teacher offering a disorganized class - they've already paid, they'd get a W or an F on their transcript, and even if not, where would they go?"

But I need to remember that even though this is kind of true, and even though this is a plausible explanation for why there are flaws in a class, there are other explanations that are more sympathetic:

1. Some of the teachers may not be the best in the world, but they're still offering an education with high altruistic and earning potential attached to it at an amazingly low price relative to the long-term benefit. It's still a pretty good deal, even with all the stress and frustration.
2. The teachers might have the same frustrations with the school bureaucracy, the curriculum vendors, shitty, dishonest, manipulative students, and their own demanding and stressful lives. They might actually be working hard to offer the best class they can - and it might just be a hard problem to solve.
3. The systemic problems are extremely difficult and don't have any lovely solutions. Goodhart's Law isn't just a cute explanation for individual problems. It's the institutional equivalent of gravity. It's what drags everything down, slows us down, makes things collapse. Oh, we can try to evaluate and incentivize. We can test, we can evaluate, we can complain. But the value of it all is dubious.

So rather than anguishing over the shortcomings, the right response is to appreciate that we're able to have even so much. For a mere $12,000 or so, I've been able to go from a music teacher scraping by to a top student eagerly sought by bioinformatics grad programs that will offer the chance to more than triple my annual salary and do work that I'm very passionate about. That's the American story right there. It's not supposed to be easy or smooth. It's just possible with grit, hard work, and intelligence.

What if I shift from seeing schools as a "staircase to knowledge" to seeing them as "a climbing wall of knowledge?"

A staircase is something that takes effort, but every effort has been made to engineer the experience to be as stable, organized, and safe as possible.

A climbing wall still has safety features - you belay - but the point is to give you a better climbing experience. It's fundamentally a demanding, self-structured solo activity. It includes a combination of deadlines and grades as a commitment device, and some social supports. But if I take organic chemistry, learning it through a class is just the same as learning it solo, except that the experience has been structured the same way that routes get established on a climbing wall.

Does having that perspective on school change the way I interpret its "shortcomings?"

Definitely.

If schools do as good or better a job than students could have done as autodidacts, then they've succeeded. I doubt I could force as much knowledge of chemistry, linear algebra, and molecular biology that I'm acquiring this quarter into my head if I was studying on my own. It would probably be less stressful without the constant pressure, but it would be slower at the very least. If school can ram more knowledge into your head in 12 weeks than you could have shoved in there on your own, then it's doing its job.

If schools actually hold students back relative to what they could have learned on their own, then they've failed. I have taken one or two classes from teachers who truly seemed to add so much stress, with so many negative idiosyncrasies, that I think there's a good chance I'd have been better off with pure self-study. But even so, it's very hard to know, since I wouldn't have had the commitment device of having to earn a grade. And that's just my experience - maybe others would have done better in the class than on their own.

In the future, I will try to shift to the "climbing wall" perspective. School is here to offer some support and structure. But it's also here, primarily here, to breathe down my neck and MAKE me learn. It's here for the same reason the drill instructor is at boot camp. It's not to make the 100 pushups easy. It's to make damned sure that I do them and that I can't give myself an easy pass, push it off til next hour, next day, next week, next year. I'm paying $600 per quarter for a drill instructor.

Supplying the curiosity, the organization, the learning, the success - that's entirely up to me. School's a commitment device first and foremost. It's a place where I can rent educational capital (access to labs, tutoring, grading). It's also a place where I can purchase the opportunity to form relationships that I can leverage into further opportunities, through letters of recommendation, career advice, introductions, and so on.

The least important thing school has to offer is "teaching" or "education" or "learning."

Only I can offer that to myself.

I like the idea. Ultimately I think it incentivizes teaches to be a bit more likable.  For certain cultures with certin goals this would be beneficial, for others less so.

Epistemic status: babble all the way down, not pruning. But I believe my approach is better than most of other answers here.

The error from other LWers  is not separating the evaluation of lessons to the evaluation of tests. 

Students should be allowed to give good teachers a bonus. For each lesson, in any moment of the lesson, the students should have the possibility to rate the teacher's performance on some metrics. Think on a mobile application that does that. Do you know when you take a ride with an Uber and immediately after finishing the ride you rate it? We should have the same possibility of rating teachers after their lessons (up until some limit, e.g., you had your lesson on Monday, you won't be able to rate it on the next month, you have until a week to rate this lesson). The teacher should be paid a bonus when he gets good scores. This bonus would be added lesson by lesson to teacher's account. 

Let's say each week I have three different lessons with professors A, B and C.
Professor A gives me 2 hours lesson/week. 
Professor B gives me 4 hours lesson/week. 
Professor C gives me 6 hours lesson/week. 

For each two hours lesson, the student gains one point to spend. So, I have 6 points to spend on spend on professors A, B, C in any way I choose to.

The professor A, I've just watched his lesson and I loved it. I give him 3 points. Professor B is good too, I like him, but I will just give him two points. Professor C is not that good teacher, but he seems to be working hard on these particular difficult topics, I'll give him one point.

On the end of the month, good teachers will be rewarded by how good their performance were on THE LESSONS. I haven't spent time thinking on a good function to convert the scores received by the teacher on this week to money, but it doesn't seem hard to create a fair one.

We should have a separate rating system for the evaluation of the tests applied by the teacher, so we could separate the feelings that appear on our heart when we compare the quality of the lessons to the difficulty of the problems posed by the professor on his test. We know when we go bad on an exam, "that's the teacher's fault". So this separate system would be more strict, asking several questions like "How difficult was this test? How many hours have you studied before doing it? The questions on the test were related to things taught on the lessons? How do you compare the difficult of the test questions to the difficult of the lessons' questions? Leave a comment about the test on the following Entry box". Obviously I haven't pruned these questions, they just arrived at my mind, but certainly there exist a very good set of questions that could let us investigate how well the teachers perform in creating tests and also reward them when we detect it. 

Thinking again about the first system, it should also have some questions about the lesson. "How good the professor explains the concepts? How organized he is? Did you learn the concepts? How do you rate the difficulty of the topics this teacher is trying to explain to you? [Leave here what kind of questions you believe would improve this questionnaire]. Leave a comment about the lesson on the following Entry box". 

It shouldn't be needed for a student to answer these questions to give all his points  for a teacher. But we could weight the student points by how many questions he answered. For example, if I gave you 3 points and I said why I've done this, this weighs more than a student that gives you 3 points but doesn't explain why he does that. Justified rating is worth more than unjustified rating.

1. this advantages teachers with larger classes.

Your reward function can take in consideration the number of students that participated on the lesson, the number of students the rated the professor, and also you could average the scores, I don't know, come on, you can create a function that is fair for any class size, you just have to think about what function you will use

Where does the money come from?

Diminish all salaries in x%. Now you can redistribute this money more fairly, proportional to performance.

My second-favorite teacher in undergrad was relatively unpopular because he taught very difficult classes, at least some of which were required to graduate.

That's why it is important to evaluate the LESSONS every week. And when the test comes, this is a different evaluation. This professor was unpopular due to difficult tests, not to bad lessons, right? 

Most universitites have already systems where students evaluate their teachers at the end of the year and the scores do figure into administrative decisions of the university

That's the problem. At the end of the year you are evaluating the "teacher", which means 

If I find the teacher a good professor and I give him +5 points, but I sucked at his tests, and I give -10 points for my bad feelings for doing bad on the test, the final evaluation of the teacher is "tis teacher is bad" == -5

If the system rates week by week, we could detect misuse of the system if we suddenly see bad lessons ratings close to the test application (right after the test, for example). 

I don't think this is how market wages work. If it is known that the average teacher gets a $100 bonus, the school will offer $100 less in base pay than it would otherwise.

Maybe not right now, when the change is introduced. But in the following years, the wages will raise slower than they would otherwise, until the balance is achieved.

It doesn't seem bad to pay a little less for the average teacher with average lessons, and pay a little more for the above average teacher with above average lessons. It seems like arbitrage. You do good lessons, you earn more. Why not? And if you can now detect which teachers are much worse than average, you can fire them and get even more students that are interested in this school full of good teachers, because the bad ones can't stay

I don't know about the US education market, but here in Iran, the students don't have much choice at all. Even if they know a professor sucks, they are forced to take his class because the classes of good professors fill up, and they need to pass the course. 

I like the idea, to the extent that yes, students should have some influence in how they are taught. I'd like it much better if there were a second or even a third SAB, a year or several years later. Otherwise you end up with scenarios where Mr. A is the most well liked Calc 1 teacher, but Mrs. B does a much better job preparing her students for Calc II. Or where you leave a class having no idea what you just learned, but it ends up becoming really important in grad school 4 years later.

(shouldn't it be $150?)