Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evaluation Of Women And Men Professors: How Gender Scripts Affect Students' Assessments, Elizabeth A. Hoffmann

ADVANCE-Purdue Gender and STEM Research Symposium

All universities strive for high quality teaching. In the late 1970’s, colleges and universities began systematically soliciting feedback from students regarding teaching. Rather than relying on colleague-evaluations, the new administrative philosophy advocated bringing in students’ own assessment of their professors. Today, these student assessments are often the only evaluation of college teaching.

The change to include students’ perspectives was particularly supported by women faculty. Ironically, some research suggests that student evaluations might be quite biased against women professor. Such a bias would not only be unfair, but it would have substantial consequences for those women faculty, since student evaluation are …