Student Evaluations of Teaching are useless at evaluating your ability to teach & are biased against women, people of color & foreign faculty. They erode instructional quality & discourage innovative pedagogy. Profs teach only to not be hurt by them. They should be banned.
here is what we "learned" about my teaching from my falls evals. Now, given that the evals never really directly ask the students if they learn anything, which I would assume would be the point of the class, this year I added in that direct question so at least I know I 
accomplished that goal, and the tangential goal I also bring to my intro to Amer Gov class, which is to try to get them to be more likely to vote in the future. But again, I added these 4 questions, a practice you are discouraged against doing bc it might backfire badly.
I added these questions bc the focus on needing to get 5s (and not 4s) & glowing comments about how wonderful a PERSON I am requires me to focus on a different set of classroom priorities than if these scores and comments did not determine my ability to keep my job & be promoted
and I want to be sure that in my efforts to be well-loved by my students, all of whom are aware they possess this magic power of review, I am not sacrificing (too much) what should be the main focus which is teaching them. Being well loved must always remain the #1 goal at all
times though, and anyone operating under this type of tenure & promotion system that tells you being well-loved is not their proximate goal, is lying to you. And of course, if you are woman, a person of color, if you have disability, or a foreign accent, you have an extra hurdle
between you and that 5, one that is well-documented in the peer-reviewed literature. So you better work extra hard at being well-loved.
I should also thank @rebeccakreitzer for she is the one that tirelessly amasses and keeps the running lit review on bias in student reviews of teaching.
