Teaching Evaluations and Student Grades: That’s Not Fair!

Abstract

University teachers and students are evaluated regularly on their performance, and when evaluations are lower than expected, the feedback may be threatening to the individual, potentially causing deviant behaviors including un-collegiality and poor performance. In this paper, we use the self-threat model of procedural justice to examine faculty responses to teaching evaluations (Study 1) and student responses to course grades (Study 2). The model proposes that group identification influences self-serving bias and self-threat, which then influences procedural justice, and helps explain why teachers and students sometimes criticize decision procedures considered fair by socially accepted standards. Results show full support of the model for faculty responses to evaluations and partial support for student responses to grades. Group identification mitigated self-threat and self-serving bias for the faculty sample but had no influence on the student sample. These findings overall suggest that it is important to reduce the level of self-threat to make negative feedback less threatening to both teachers and students. This may be done either directly via fostering group identification or indirectly by making sure that sensitive performance-based information is not shared to the public.