Factors That Affect College of Business Student Opinion of Teaching and Learning

Abstract

In this study, the authors analyzed 12,153 student faculty evaluations to investigate the effects of (a) faculty member gender; (b) course type (required business core courses, classes within designated majors, or graduate classes); and (c) course level (graduate versus undergraduate classes) on student faculty evaluations. The authors explored the effect of these three factors on students' perceptions of how much they learned in particular classes. They found that female instructors rated better than male ones and that ratings differed significantly by course type and by students' perceived amount of learning. Graduate students tended to give higher scores than undergraduates. These findings could indicate that comparing evaluation data across different courses might not produce valid overall effectiveness rankings.