At the end of each semester, college students have a chance to give feedback to their professors in the form of student evaluations, basically “rating” them. On the whole, professors are often not really comfortable with this, which has led to a great deal of research on the topic. Critics of student evaluations tend to point out that they don’t really measure the actual teaching effectiveness of a professor, only perceived teaching effectiveness. They also readily point out that the correlation between student evaluations and future student performance is weak. There are other fundamental concerns: Arguably, student evaluations come at the worst possible time—at the end of the semester, when it is too late for the professor to change anything about the course and usually too early for the students to fully appreciate the utility of what they learned in the class. Finally, there are fundamental conflicts of interest involved, given that professors who grade more harshly tend to receive lower ratings, and students have clear interest in their grades while professors depend on receiving good ratings for promotion, tenure, and so on. We’re both researchers who have taught college students, so we’re quite familiar both with the process and the response from our colleagues.