On the other hand, teachers often pay little attention to the ratings because they are designed for general purposes and often do not deal with the questions that a particular teacher is most concerned about: Did I use the right mix of lecture and discussion? Were the assignments and the reading sufficiently challenging, but not too hard to get through? What concepts, ideas, and attitudes did the students learn?

Some institutions have already separated the two purposes of evaluating teaching. The University of Arizona, for instance, has an Office of Assessment and Enrollment Research, to which teachers may apply for an evaluation; a facilitator from the office discusses the instructor's strengths and weaknesses with the students and then reports to the teacher alone what the students have to say. In that way, suggestions for how to improve a professor's teaching are kept wholly separate, as they should be, from the evaluation on which salary and professional advancement depend.

When we look at the ways institutions have misused assessments of students' writing ability, we find other interesting parallels to the evaluation of teaching ability. For example, when money and time are short, an institution may substitute a multiple-choice test of usage, grammar, or mechanics for actual assessment of students' writing. An even worse abuse occurs when institutions use aptitude tests like the SAT or ACT—which are not designed to measure what a student has learned—in an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of a writing program.