Oscar: Clearly, student evaluations provide the best assessment of teacher performance. Who is in a better position t...

Victoria on March 22, 2020

Hi @Masada,

Happy to help!

Oscars believes that student evaluations are the best assessment of teacher performance because students are in the best position to make such an assessment.

Bettina believes that peer evaluations of teachers might be a better alternative to student evaluations because students generally don't appreciate a teacher's impact until many years after having taken their class.

Based on the above viewpoints, we can conclude that Oscar and Bettina disagree over whether student evaluations are the best method for evaluating teachers.

This is re-stated by answer choice (C), making it the correct answer.

Answer choice (A) is close, but Bettina does not argue that students can NEVER adequately judge a teacher's performance. They merely state that students generally fail to appreciate a teacher's impacts at the end of a class. As this is a generalization, it means that there are likely some students who do appreciate their teachers' impacts at the end of a class.

This is further supported by the fact that Bettina argues that peer evaluations might be a good supplement to student evaluations or a better alternative to student evaluations. They are not arguing that students cannot ever adequately evaluate their teachers' performance; they are simply claiming that student evaluations might best be supplemented or replaced by peer evaluations due to a general tendency of students failing to immediately appreciate the impacts that their teacher may have had on them.

Hope this is helpful! Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Masada on April 21, 2020

Thank you so much!