As a person who’s taught at a number of universities for quite a while, I have some opinions about this.
I know that when I teach my SET scores better be excellent or else I will have some problems in my life. And so I put some effort into making my students like me (Trust me, it’s a challenge) and perform a burlesque of hyper-competence lest I get that dreaded “doesn’t appear to know the material” comment. I give them detailed information about the structure of the exam. I don’t give them tasks that they will hate even when I think it would benefit certain learning styles. I don’t expect them to have done the reading*.
Before anyone starts up on a “kids today are too coddled” rant, it is not the students who make me do this. I teach the way I do because ensuring my SET scores are excellent is a large part** of both my job and my job security. I adapt my teaching practice to the instrument used to measure it***.
I actually enjoy this challenge. I don’t think any of the things that I do to stabilize my SET scores are bad practice (otherwise I would do it differently), but let’s not mistake the motives.
(For the record, I also adapt my teaching practice to minimize the effects of plagiarism and academic dishonesty. This means that take-home assignments cannot be a large part of my assessment scheme. If I had to choose between being a dick to students who didn’t do the readings and being able to assess my courses with assignments, I’d choose the latter in a heartbeat.)
But SETs have some problems. Firstly, there’s increasingly strong evidence that women, people of colour, and people who speak english with the “wrong” accent**** receive systematically lower SET scores. So as an assessment instrument, SETs are horribly biased.