www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/05/08/rateprof
James Felton, a professor of finance and law at Central Michigan University, and colleagues looked at ratings for nearly 7,000 faculty members from 370 institutions in the United States and Canada, and his verdict is: the hotter and easier professors are, the more likely they'll get rated as a good teacher. As far as students -- or whoever is rating professors on the open Rate My Professor site -- are concerned, nothing predicts a quality instructor like hotness. "Hotness" is determined by evaluators choosing "hot" or "not hot," with each click counting as either +1 or -1. Some faculty members might be happy to know, however, that being hot and easy don't necessarily go together. The relationships are most pronounced for professors that students rated as really, really hot, or really, really not. The 102 professors ranked as least attractive in the sample had an average quality rating of 214, and an average easiness rating of 220. Meanwhile the 99 "hottest" profs had an average quality score of 443, and an easiness rating of 35 Felton said that the vast majority of the 750,000 past and present professors rated on RMP don't have extreme hot or not ratings, but he said that, beyond the obvious drawbacks of RMP - "anybody can post, and post as much as they want" - the survey "shows us just how biased students are by easiness and sexiness." Felton said that the study is not an attack, or an endorsement of RateMyProfessors, but the site provided data, and a good way to get a sense of what might influence anonymous student evaluations, whether on RMP or elsewhere.
have started their own, internal online rating systems to offer students a reliable alternative to RateMyProfessors. In terms of discipline, engineering, computer science, and chemistry had both the lowest quality and hotness ratings. Languages, sociology, and political science had the top quality ratings, and ranked first, sixth, and fifth, respectively, out of 36 disciplines for hotness. When Felton subtracted the easiness score and an adjusted hotness score from the quality score, chemistry jumped to the top of the "adjusted quality" list. In a previous paper, Felton and colleagues offered two explanations, from other researchers, for the relationship between hotness and quality. The first is the "Immediacy Principle," which posits that students are more engaged by attractive teachers who they think they'd want to socialize with, and might consequently do a better job learning. The other is the "Halo Effect," the idea that students approach attractive teachers with the mindset that "they can do no wrong," Felton said. Halo "is the one we've sided with," Felton said, adding that "it's really a guess, just based on the comments" that go with the scores. Felton said that most comments tend to be either glowing, or biting, and added that the comments that bothered him most are those that say: "It was a really boring class. I didn't learn much, but it was easy, so I recommend it." Felton said he joked about naming a 2004 article he co-authored on the topic: "Great Class, Easy as Hell." Felton said that, for the most part, he thinks professors and administrators take RMP with a grain of salt, but he added that it has become a widely recognized part of college culture, and that "if a department is trying to hire somebody new and they don't really know much about them, they might take a peek."
Rate Your Students, a response to RMP, recalled Googling someone who was applying for a job at his institution. com comments, and several noted that the person in question would bring her cat to class. "I have no way to know if this is true," The Professor said. "But once it was in there, I couldn't get it out of my brain." com, said that a recent survey showed that 60 percent of all quality ratings are "positive," or are at least the score of 35 which merits a smiley face. Nagle said that RMP gets inquiries now and then from faculty members asking why a chili pepper, which symbolizes a positive hotness score, disappeared. As to any hotness or easiness bias on the part of students, Nagle said that students have a right to express their opinions, and to help other students choose professors in any way they see fit. As for the contention that RMP scores can actually hurt a professor's career, Nagle said he thinks the sentiment is "overblown." He added that RMP collects the IP addresses of users, and said that, on a few occasions, the Rate My Professors staff has decided to report to an institution a professor who was excessively ripping his or her colleagues on the site. "There have been issues where a school has cracked down on professors grading their colleagues," he said. In case any faculty members are worried that RateMyProfessors has no heart at all, the site doesn't display hotness scores below zero, because it does not want to embarrass professors. According to Felton's study, however, they may well be able to infer such ratings from quality ratings that are in the gutter.
Although I have little doubt that the conclusions presented are reasonable, I would point out that the chili pepper may also be the undeserved result of an genuinely positive evaluation of a prof's teaching. No objective judge of physical "hotness" would give me a chili pepper, but my students (who have rated me positively in the two critical categories, despite only a mid-range "easiness") have nevertheless awarded me that spicy distinction. I can only attribute that to generosity on their part -- not that I'm complaining...
at Fort Hays State University, at 6:05 am EDT on May 8, 2006 scoring ratings It would be interesting to see a male vs. female comparison for ratings, over types of colleges and universities, since the data is present. LM, at 7:45 am EDT on May 8, 2006 confirmation This studies findings about "hotness" merely confirms what Hamermesh and Parker have already reported in their Economics of Education Review article (v. BTW, that study also shows the effect of gender--male instructors' scores are disproportionately affected by their perceived attractivenss. Social science 101 tells us that correlation does not mean causation, and in this case the arrow might easily run the other way. A quality instructor certainly makes the material seem much easier than an incompetent one. And certainly someone's skill and dynamism in any field has a lot to do with attractiveness. Dave S, Assoc Prof at Land Grant U, at 9:32 am EDT on May 8, 2006 I have worked at three institutions in the last few years, and I find virtually all the published ratings of instructors I know personally to be pretty accurate. As to favorable ratings and easiness -- don't you think there has to be a postivie correlation? Instructors who provide clear expectations, lecture in an organized manner in plain English, and are helpful outside of class are going to be rated easy. Won't these teachers SEEM easy as opposed to confusing, non-helpful teachers? Admittedly, rated well, at 9:32 am EDT on May 8, 2006 Let's also not forget that the validity of student surveys often is called into question because of... In other words, I know that many teachers are labeled "hot" as a complete joke. db, at 10:05 am EDT on May 8, 2006 Bogus research, bogus story Sorry, guys, but there's a key phrase in here that negates the whole study and, therefore, any reporting or commentary on it. When Epstein wrote this: "but he said that, beyond the obvious drawbacks of RMP - anybody can post, and post as much as they want' - the survey 'shows us just how biased students are by easiness and sexiness' " he put us on notice that the research is totally specious and that no valid conclusions or statements -- no, as in none, dada, rien -- can be made about the "data." The only statement can be made with certainty based on this study is that the researcher is criminally ignorant of research methodology. That the "data"-gathering method allows for repeated responses by the same students is an indicator of the web site's fatal flaw -- the survey sample is self-selected. The first rule of survey research is that respondents must be sampled AT RANDOM if the results are to be valid ...
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