Abstract

Abstract Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used in academic personnel decisions as a measure of teaching effectiveness. We show: SET are biased against female instructors by an amount that is large and statistically significant. The bias affects how students rate even putatively objective aspects of teaching, such as how promptly assignments are graded. The bias varies by discipline and by student gender, among other things. It is not possible to adjust for the bias, because it depends on so many factors. SET are more sensitive to students’ gender bias and grade expectations than they are to teaching effectiveness. Gender biases can be large enough to cause more effective instructors to get lower SET than less effective instructors. These findings are based on nonparametric statistical tests applied to two datasets: 23,001 SET of 379 instructors by 4,423 students in six mandatory first-year courses in a five-year natural experiment at a French university, and 43 SET for four sections of an online course in a randomized, controlled, blind experiment at a US university.

Highlights

  • Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are used widely in decisions about hiring, promoting, and firing instructors

  • Randomized experiments [2,3] have shown that students confuse grades and grade expectations with the long-term value of a course and that SET are not associated with student performance in follow-on courses, a proxy for teaching effectiveness

  • We find that the association between SET and an objective measure of teaching effectiveness, performance on the anonymously graded final, is weak and – for these data – generally not statistically significant

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Summary

Introduction

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are used widely in decisions about hiring, promoting, and firing instructors. Measuring teaching effectiveness is difficult – for students, faculty, and administrators alike. In some circumstances the association between SET and an objective measure of teaching effectiveness is negative, as our results below reinforce. Randomized experiments [2,3] have shown that students confuse grades and grade expectations with the long-term value of a course and that SET are not associated with student performance in follow-on courses, a proxy for teaching effectiveness. Boring [5] finds that SET are affected by gender biases and stereotypes. Experimental work by MacNell et al [6] finds that when students think an instructor is female, students rate the instructor lower on every aspect of teaching, including putatively objective measures such as the timeliness with which instructors return assignments

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