This paper reports on a study intended to examine problems in student evaluation systems that may lead to manifestations of student disengagement from secondary school such as absenteeism, low effort, violence, or vandalism. A theoretical framework is provided by Dornbusch and Scott's theory of evaluation and authority in organizations, which assumes that participants place value on performance evaluations and establish an "acceptance level" or minimum satisfactory level of evaluation. The theory discusses evaluation systems in terms of a typology of authority system incompatibilities that prevent participants from achieving evaluations at or above their acceptance level. A self-report survey on levels of incompatibilities in evaluation of academic performance and social behavior was administered to 293 high school students. The general findings were that evaluation of academic work is characterized by more problems with misunderstandings of criteria, nonrepresentative samples, inappropriately high standards, and active tasks, while evaluation of social behavior shows higher levels of problems due to interdependence of group participants, coordination failures, and conflicts between staff's and peers' criteria. It is concluded that the theoretical incompatibilities in evaluation and authority systems do occur frequently for secondary students and that future investigations might try to link these incompatibilities to student disengagement. (MJL)