Student evaluation of teaching is an important measurement of teaching quality in tertiary education, as it is used for decision-making regarding evaluated teachers’ promotions or even contract terminations despite numerous methodological limitations, such as the lack of adequate guidance for the interpretation of its results. Therefore, this thesis aims to analyse which values on ordinal measurement scales are used as benchmarks when interpreting average scores of the aforementioned evaluations. The theoretical part systematically reviews this subject, while the empirical part analyses the websites of 1,300 most reputable universities and offers an analysis conducted of 23 universities that participated in our preliminary or pilot study. Universities rarely identify or publish their benchmarks; nevertheless, we identified four groups of benchmarks based on the empirical results, which we name as “critically low”, “low”, “positive”, and “excellent”. In these groups, the following benchmarks, calculated on a scale of 1 to 5, occur most frequently: average scores lower than 3.0 or 3.5 (two modes) are “critically low”, scores lower than 3.5 are “low”, “positive” scores start at 4.0 and “excellent” at 4.5. These benchmarks are significantly higher than those mentioned in the literature, which appears to be less strict. The University of Ljubljana’s benchmarks only partially coincide with those from the empirical research and have many peculiarities.
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