The Gendered Tyranny of Teacher Evaluations

NPR is touting a story this morning about research demonstrating gender bias in teacher evaluations.

New study finds that student evaluations are biased against female faculty. @npr_ed https://t.co/14g9YNSnSs

— NPR (@NPR) January 25, 2016

The link goes to a story that makes a somewhat different observation.

The linked article is titled, Student Evaluations of Teaching (Mostly) Do Not Measure Teaching Effectiveness. That's a pretty big divergence of conclusions.

The NPR essayist who analyzed the study, Anya Kamenetz, titled her article, Why Female Professors Get Lower Ratings. The study and the NPR article touting it should be the title of a college course about confirmation bias. I would take it, if only to spitefully give the female professor low marks on her evaluation.

Kidding! Because the study found that, in the United States, there is a "positive female student bias for male instructors." In other words, the gender bias against female instructors is coming from other women!

Let's call it the Hillary Effect. A January 12 poll of likely New Hampshire voters found Bernie Sanders leading Hillary among women, 50-44. Women exert social control over other women much more than males. The French male students rated their male instructors higher. Perhaps there is an underlying cultural bias that explains this?

Philip Stark, co-author of the study, says that, "trying to adjust for the bias to make Student Evaluated Teaching (SET) 'fair' is hopeless." It's a subjective measure. Forget about fair.

But for people like Kamenetz, fairness is everything, and testing is tyrannical. She interjects her opinion that "Student Evaluations of Teaching, or SET, [is] pretty much useless." It's one measure and nobody is suggesting it should be the only measure of teacher effectiveness.

Can an effective teacher be quantified by using test scores? Perhaps. The study asserts that there is no correlation between an instructor's rating and grades. Maybe they are measuring the wrong thing. Maybe they should be looking whether the student exceeded their grade or performance expectations.