Biases in student evaluations of teaching: An exploratory analysis to a Chinese case study

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines factors influencing on student evaluations of teaching (SET) with consideration of disciplinary variations. Data were obtained from a university in Guangzhou of China and consisted of 1443 undergraduate course ratings collected from 19 schools over two semesters. The students and courses are classified into hard and soft disciplinary groupings and divided into four sub-groups for further comparison. The result of the ANOVA test showed significant difference in the mean SET scores across four subgroups; and results of linear models reflect students who major in hard discipline tend to give higher SET scores regardless of the course’s feature. In addition, there was also evidence of possible biases in the ratings according to the features of teachers, students and courses. Overall, the disciplinary differences would need to be considered when decisions are being made on the basis of the SET scores, especially for cross-school evaluation.