Do the best professors get the worst ratings (from students)?

bclintonk
Mon, 03 Jun 2013 17:31:51 +0000

I think it’s a mixed bag. Some professors really are bad teachers, and this doesn’t necessarily correlate with scholarly achievements, knowledge of the field, or longevity. Some professors really are good teachers; this also doesn’t necessarily correlate with scholarly achievement, knowledge, or longevity. Good teachers tend to be popular and get good student evaluations, and bad teachers tend to get bad student evaluations.

I also think some professors are popular without necessarily being good teachers. People in this third category tend to be funny and/or witty, good looking, stylish, glib, good storytellers, charismatic, somewhat theatrical in always putting on a good show, au courant with the popular culture the students are consuming, and young (there’s nothing more pathetic than an old, out-of-touch professor trying to make current pop culture references and misfiring). Someone with those characteristics is going to get good student evaluations pretty much regardless of the course content or how effectively the material is actually taught. They’re entertainers more than teachers, and frankly some students prefer entertainment to learning.

Of course, it’s possible to be both a good entertainer and an effective teacher, and perhaps that’s the best combination; but it’s also possible to be an effective teacher without being a good entertainer, or vice versa. Students don’t always draw those distinctions, and some students tend to reward entertainment value more than teaching.

There’s actually an extensive scholarly literature on this. Studies have found student teaching evaluations tend to reward the physical beauty of the instructor (student evaluations of teaching correlate positively with ratings of physical appearance by independent panels of observers), grade inflation (instructors who give high grades get high marks in return from their students; this is especially true of adjuncts), small classes, entertainment value, and perceived warmth/friendliness of the instructor, while exhibiting biases based on gender (female instructors generally fare worse, but female instructors in traditionally male-dominated fields tend to get even lower evaluations), race (racial minorities generally fare worse; test groups give higher evaluations to the identical lecture if shown a picture of a white person than a picture of a racial minority), and foreign-born status (studies have suggested any trace of a foreign accent, especially Asian, will prompt student complaints that they “can’t understand” the instructor, even if the instructor exhibits English fluency in expert diagnostic tests). Young Asian women with traces of accents tend to fare especially poorly. A famous Harvard study asked students to rate professors based on a 30-second video clip; the results closely correlated with actual student evaluations at the end of a semester-long course of instruction, suggesting the student evaluations may ultimately be more about what is known in the television industry as “Q-rating,” i.e., how appealing is this person’s visual appearance, personality, and demeanor, given all the subjective biases that go into that, rather than the effectiveness of the instruction.

The story linked in the OP raises another troubling possibility: perhaps some truly effective teachers are punished by their students for taking them outside their comfort zone. My guess is this probably does happen occasionally, but probably not a lot. I do think there are a lot of very good teachers who will never win teaching awards because they’re too “hard” and/or unconventional to be popular, but generally these people do well enough on their teaching evaluations, especially in more advanced courses, because they tend to draw students who are comfortable with their teaching style. I’d be more concerned that some genuinely bad teachers would hide behind the category of “too good for the students” to justify their bad teaching evaluations.