Students hate good teachers

Teachers often find student evaluations rather frustrating. They are contradictory, short-sighted and sometimes insulting, especially when students did not put much effort in the class in the first place. Student evaluations are also biased towards teachers who are physically more appealing. And students, with their lack of experience and expertise, are not in a good position to evaluate an expert. What more could be said against student evaluations?

Michela Braga, Marco Paccagnella and Michele Pellizzari find that better teachers get worse evaluations. The way they measure teacher effectiveness is by looking at how students do in subsequent classes. They find that teachers matter, and substantially as the teacher can explain 43% of the standard deviation in subsequent grades. But the good teachers get a worse student evaluation, which is frightening, because administrators are getting the wrong message.

From the tables, I gather that higher ranked faculty teach better, but older and researchers with higher H-indexes do worse, which is rather contradictory. I wonder whether taking into account the obviously high correlation between some of the independent variables would take care of this, or other controls, like the attractiveness mentioned above.

Are hot teachers better teachers?

It is well known that beautiful and tall people have better lives and are better paid. This is especially thought to be true in activities where skills are relatively unimportant. What about economics professors?

Anindya Sen, Marcel Voia and Frances Woolley use the hotness indicators from student evaluations at ratemyprofessor.com in Ontario and find hot economics university professors are paid a whooping 10% more than their less attractive counterparts. Not only is this a large number, it also runs counter to previous results that such effects are limited to unskilled professions. This effect is especially strong for men and not present for women, Indeed women who negotiate hard are not deemed attractive.

In addition, hotter teachers also get better student evaluations, even after controlling for all what the authors could put their hands on. For other indicators of professor productivity, it turns out that hotness affects positively women for citations, although this could be due to a few highly cited women (citation counts are always very skewed). But neither men nor women publish significantly more when hot, but they tend to attract more co-authors. I really need to be careful with my appearance.