Using student course experience survey to assess university professors’ teaching performance is not new in practice. What has been left out the discussions so far is how university professors interpret and act upon the survey results. Interview data has been collected in the largest offshore campus of an Australia university in Vietnam. 10 faculty staff participated in this interview study in 2014. Results suggest that 1) faculty staff seemed to treat the student survey as a norm-referenced rather than a criterion referenced assessment, as they were more concerned about their relative positions against other staff rather than the extent to which they have demonstrated the expected teaching performances. 2) The qualitative comments were usually ignored by university professors unless they noticed significantly low sub-scores or overall score in the result. Finally, the participants appeared to implement a wide range of unethical and superficial ways to influence the survey results.

Wei Wei
Assistant Professor in Macau University of Science and Technology. He has a PhD in Language Testing and Assessment from the University of Leeds, UK. He had worked for University of Leeds, Pearson Language Test and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Vietnam campus. His research interests are in the fields of teacher performance evaluation, language testing and assessment, and curriculum change.