[MTC Global] Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors.

A series of studies across countries and disciplines in higher education confirm that student evaluations of teaching (SET) are significantly correlated with instructor gender, with students regularly rating female instructors lower than male peers. Anne Boring, Kellie Ottoboni and Philip B. Stark argue the findings warrant serious attention in light of increasing pressure on universities to measure teaching effectiveness. Given the unreliability of the metric and the harmful impact these evaluations can have, universities should think carefully on the role of such evaluations in decision-making.

Many universities rely heavily or exclusively on student evaluations of teaching (SET) for hiring, promoting and firing instructors. After all, who experiences teaching more directly than students? But to what extent do SET measure what universities expect them to measure—teaching effectiveness?

To answer this question, we apply nonparametric permutation tests to data from a natural experiment at a French university (the original study by Anne Boring is here), and a randomized, controlled, blind experiment in the US (the original study by Lillian MacNell, Adam Driscoll and Andrea N. Hunt is here). We confirm and extend the studies' main conclusion: Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are strongly associated with the gender of the instructor. Female instructors receive lower scores than male instructors. SET are also significantly correlated with students' grade expectations: students who expect to get higher grades give higher SET, on average. But SET are not strongly associated with learning outcomes.

Some studies have found little difference between average SET for male and female instructors, but the design of those studies have serious flaws. Not only are they observational studies rather than experiments, they ask the wrong question, namely, "do male and female instructors get similar SET?" A better question is, "would female instructors get higher SET but for the mere fact that they are women?" We can answer that question using these unique data sets: "yes."

​Source: London School of Economics​

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