Via the AP: Tables turn on professors.

It’s time for students to evaluate their professors across the country, and while I actually would like serious feedback from my students, I must confess that I have never been especially impressed with the course evaluation process (either as a student or as a faculty member). I find that the questions are usually of little use, and the students typically don’t take them all that seriously.

Indeed, as the story notes:

Not all comments are indifferent. Some are thoughtful and useful. But others are capricious. That sometimes worries young teachers, for whom evaluations can play a significant role in whether or not they are promoted to tenure.

For instance, professors who give good grades get better reviews, studies have shown. It isn’t clear if that means teachers can “buy” affection with grade inflation, or whether the good grades and reviews both reflect genuinely better teaching.

While I am sure that tough graders do get good reviews, I suspect that in general the variable most correlated to positive reviews is the grade the student received in a given course. I further suspect that such relationships are especially true in larger general studies classes where the students were forced to take the course and likely know very little about the subject material (as opposed to students majoring in a subject). Really, one has to wonder about what is really being measured in those courses: are you capturing the discontent of students who are angry that they had to take American Government because it was a requirement? Are you capturing the disgust that the student has for the subject itself? Are you capturing the fact that the student was often absent, and when he was in class he was hung-over?

One would suspect that the evals in the major-level courses would factor out at least some of those problems.

The piece continues:

There’s a similar effect for physically attractive professors, according to a much-discussed 2024 study by two University of Texas researchers (”Beauty in the Classroom: Professors’ Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity”). One possible explanation was that better-looking teachers simply hold students’ attention longer, so they actually are more effective.

“If you’re in class because a professor is good looking, you’re still paying more attention,” co-author Daniel Hamermesh said in an interview.

Well, that’s helpful.

More:

Other studies have documented how students respond differently to men and women. Female professors are more likely to get called “accessible,” “enthusiastic” and “caring.” Men are more likely to be described as “brilliant.” Such research troubled Upson-Saia, at Occidental, so much that she actually tells her students about it to make them aware of their potential biases before they fill out their forms.

One study even found students who were given chocolate gave their instructors higher marks.

Advice for non-tenured faculty across the country, I guess.

All of this reminds me of a piece I noted in passing the other day over at Inside Higher Ed: Validation for RateMyProfessors.com?

Last year, a scholarly study found a high correlation between RateMyProfessors.com and a university’s own system of student evaluations. Now, a new study is finding a high correlation between RateMyProfessors and a student evaluation system used nationally.

A new study is about to appear in the journal Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education and it will argue that there are similarities in the rankings in RateMyProfessors.com and IDEA, a student evaluation system used at about 275 colleges nationally and run by a nonprofit group affiliated with Kansas State University.

This is presented as validation for RateMyProfessor.com–but to me it makes me wonder if it simply illustrates how vapid the on-campus evaluation programs are.

I will say that my general experience with campus-based evals has correlated well with the limited entries on me at RateMy Professor.com (but the sample is quite small).