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Grades and student evaluations of teachers
ARTICLE

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Economics of Education Review Volume 18, Number 1 ISSN 0272-7757 Publisher: Elsevier Ltd

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between grading practices and student evaluations is especially important in higher education because of the increasing importance of this instrument in the promotion process. If evaluations can be increased by giving higher grades, then they are a flawed instrument for the evaluation of teaching. Further, this process may be contributing to the inflation of grades in higher education if faculty have an incentive to increase their evaluations. Also, grade inflation dilutes the signaling role of educational credentials in screening workers for the labor market. In this paper, we revisit the determinants of student evaluations in a model that allows for the possibility that (expected) grades are simultaneously determined. We estimate evaluations using both OLS and two-stage least squares (TSLS) and find that grades do affect an instructor's evaluation. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that instructors can “buy” better evaluations through more lenient grading. ["JEL" I20]

Citation

Krautmann, A.C. & Sander, W. Grades and student evaluations of teachers. Economics of Education Review, 18(1), 59-63. Elsevier Ltd. Retrieved October 3, 2023 from .

This record was imported from Economics of Education Review on March 1, 2019. Economics of Education Review is a publication of Elsevier.

Full text is availabe on Science Direct: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0272-7757(98)00004-1

References

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