Being a graduate student that has come back to academia after spending a long while in the industry, this question was one of the things that immediately struck me when contrasting between the two worlds. Many Tech corporates, such as Google and Microsoft, have an annual review process where the employees get to give feedback of their boss, and the managers get to do the same for their direct reports. This review process is highly impactful and carries major consequences. For both sides, it determines their promotions, raises, bonuses, or even whether they will continue in their positions or get fired. I have personally taken this for granted as part of the western democratic culture. But after moving back to academia, I am realizing it is an incorrect generalization.

But, to avoid digressing, I will focus here on academia. In the past year, I got to experience the analogous process in the academic domain. It has been obvious to me that your advisor’s opinion of you matters an order of magnitudes more than your opinion of them. Advisors actually have the annual chance to report your progress to the department. This is highly detrimental to your graduation progress and even to your funding and TAship opportunities. On the other hand, no such advisee review mechanism exists. In absence of such channel, students have way less leverage to deter their advisors from misusing their power. Students only have some unofficial channels to voice their concerns, such as a graduate student council, the program coordinator, or the ombudsperson. But, none of these channels carry a weight in terms of creating corrective force to the professor’s behavior.

One venue where students get to voice their feedback on professor performance is their classes. At the end of each semester, students get to rate their professors for the classes they took with them. My understanding is that this rating is only taken seriously if it was consistently bad across multiple classes over multiple semesters; individual feedback is simply discarded.

Reading about this issue, it seems that the importance of student feedback is hotly debated. I have not read any peer-reviewed research on this. But, looking at some online resources, many researchers argue that student rating is not reliable. For example, this source says:

The common practice of relying on averages of student teaching evaluation scores as the primary measure of teaching effectiveness for promotion and tenure decisions should be abandoned for substantive and statistical reasons: There is strong evidence that student responses to questions of ‘effectiveness’ do not measure teaching effectiveness.

https://www.aaup.org/article/student-evaluations-teaching-are-not-valid#.X6gjj9BKhyw

The argument here is that the turnout rate is low, and thus is heavily skewed by the extreme negative cases. Also, “teaching effectiveness” ratings have been shown to correlate with irrelevant factors such as gender, physical attractiveness, and leniency. So, the major concern here is that student reviews might not be about the quality of learning itself, but rather about their grades or how much “fun” the experience is, making them unscientific.

While I acknowledge these problems, I think the other extreme is as problematic. The student is the subject of academia. To not take students’ opinion makes the university flying blind. As another source puts it:

 Students can report the frequencies of teacher behaviors, the amount of work required, how much they feel they have learned, and the difficulty of the material. They can answer questions about the quality of lectures, the value of readings and assignments, the clarity of the instructor’s explanations, the instructor’s availability and helpfulness, and many other aspects of the teaching and learning process. No one else is as qualified to report what transpired during the semester, simply because no one else is there for the entire semester.

https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/articles-and-essays/the-teaching-forum/student-ratings-myths-vs-research-evidence/

In conclusion, I think this subject should be approached more carefully, but is surely important. I believe designing the right surveys would lead to meaningful statistics from the students that should be taken more seriously into consideration in affecting the professor’s future and creating an incentive for improvement. This even becomes more crucial for advisor-advisee relationship as it has a much longer time-frame and higher stakes. Lack of feedback can mean creating an environment that encourages abuse. As I always say, dictatorship never leads to good results in the long run.