A new reform movement in Japanese tertiary education has emerged which is more economy centered, more market sensitive, and more influenced by a government shift towards decentralization. With the dramatic decline in the 18 year old population, a buyer's market has led to the introduction of student evaluation of teaching surveys (SETs) partly as a measure student satisfaction. This is not without debate, and this study seeks to understand the perceptions of 22 local and expatriate English language teachers who participated in interviews. They suggest that using SETs as the sole criterion for evaluating teachers is flawed, unsystematic, and does not lead to improvement. Participants suggest the need for a model of "creative evaluation" over the present "creation of confusion." Teachers are unaware of the purpose of the evaluation which is not explained and often are just expected to administer without any consultation or input into the questions. Evaluation should draw distinction between prescriptive, acontextual summative evaluation and collaborative approaches that show the richness and diversity while giving learners as well as faculty more voice.In this study, data collected from interviews with tertiary-sector English language teaching (ELT) instructors working in different institutions in Western Japan suggest that using Student Evaluation of Teaching surveys (SETs) as the sole criterion for evaluating teachers is flawed. Instructors suggest that summative evaluations by students, being simple to collect and analyze, can be the sole criterion for adjunct ELT teacher retention, or as a punitive measure to remove tenure in tertiary establishments with diminishing student roll. But as the importance attached to student feedback increases, ensuring that feedback is collected effectively should be an important priority but there has been an "extraordinary reluctance to clarify,