Students don't know what is good for them

I have written about the problems with students evaluating classes previously, and about how it leads to a standard of pleasing students rather than challenging them. Today I found an article from last year that underlines the necessity of challenging students rather than pleasing them.

From the article:

Students are also not very good at recognising what helps them to learn. Instead, world-leading educational psychologist Robert Bjork from UCLA reports that students assess whether they have learnt something based on the ease with which they complete a related task.
That is why many students assume that reading or highlighting passages in their text-book, or merely listening to a lecture, is enough to produce learning. They mistake the ease of the task with greater knowledge. Time-consuming and effortful tasks, like self-testing their knowledge, are consequently seen by students as less efficient for their learning, despite the fact that the more difficult tasks produce the most learning.

This is a classic problem. If you challenge students into performing tasks they don't feel secure doing, they will blame the teacher if they don't perform well. Their struggles, which are actually signs of a potential learning process, become the teacher's failure when it's translated to the evaluation form. Best evaluation? Don't challenge them, and give them good grades:

As it happens, students who rated their current teacher most highly got better marks in their current course but did much worse in later courses. This confirms the fears of educators: students’ evaluations are linked with current grades, but also with students’ failure to learn things they need for the future. So, a student who is happy with their grade and teacher should worry — they may not have learnt that much.

This is a real problem, a trap that can ruin universities as educational institutions. While I think it is important to talk to students in order to identify some problems: too large or too small, old or irrelevant reading lists, teaching that goes well beyond the course, or does not happen at all (at one point it turned out the teacher had cancelled all classes, and nobody but the students knew), harassment, impropriety, confusion - the students are the ones who will notice it. But when that is covered and you have a decent teacher, the students may actually become destructive of their own learning process:

For students, it means it is important to discover what actually helps your learning and focus on that, and live with the fact that real learning takes effort. Poor marks probably do not mean you are stupid or the teacher is bad. It is more likely to mean you need to raise and/or redirect your effort.
Students should also pay less attention to student evaluations when choosing a university course — happy students may not be learning.

 And that is before we look at the teachers. Once we look at gender and ethnicity, other biases strike.

(Edited the last quote, thanks to comments!)