It was shown that student satisfaction ratings are influenced by context in ways that have important theoretical and practical implications. Using questions from the UK's National Student Survey, the study examined whether and how students' expressed satisfaction with issues such as feedback promptness and instructor enthusiasm depends on the context of comparison (such as possibly inaccurate beliefs about the feedback promptness or enthusiasm experienced at other universities) that is evoked. Experiment 1 found strong effects of experimentally provided comparison context—for example, satisfaction with a given feedback time depended on the time's relative position within a context. Experiment 2 used a novel distribution-elicitation methodology to determine the prior beliefs of individual students about what happens in universities other than their own. It found that these beliefs vary widely and that students' satisfaction was predicted by how they believed their experience ranked within the distribution of others' experiences. A third study found that relative judgement principles also predicted students' intention to complain. An extended model was developed to show that purely rank-based principles of judgement can account for findings previously attributed to range effects. It was concluded that satisfaction ratings and quality of provision are different quantities, particularly when the implicit context of comparison includes beliefs about provision at other universities. Quality and satisfaction should be assessed separately, with objective measures (such as actual times to feedback), rather than subjective ratings (such as satisfaction with feedback promptness), being used to measure quality wherever practicable. © 2014 The Authors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

中文翻译：

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学生对大学的评价是否反映了不准确的信念或实际经验？相对等级模型

研究表明，学生的满意度评级受环境影响的方式具有重要的理论和实践意义。该研究使用来自英国全国学生调查的问题，研究了学生是否以及如何表达对反馈及时性和教师热情等问题的满意度取决于比较的背景（例如可能对其他大学经历的反馈及时性或热情的不准确信念) 引起的。实验 1 发现了实验提供的比较上下文的强烈影响——例如，对给定反馈时间的满意度取决于时间在上下文中的相对位置。实验 2 使用了一种新颖的分布启发方法来确定个别学生对在大学以外的大学发生的事情的先验信念。研究发现，这些信念千差万别，学生的满意度是通过他们相信自己的经验在其他人的经验分布中的排名来预测的。第三项研究发现，相对判断原则也能预测学生的抱怨意愿。开发了一个扩展模型，以表明纯粹基于等级的判断原则可以解释以前归因于范围效应的发现。得出的结论是，满意度评分和提供质量是不同的数量，特别是当比较的隐含背景包括对其他大学提供的信念时。质量和满意度应该分开评估，在可行的情况下使用客观衡量标准（例如实际反馈时间）而不是主观评级（例如对反馈及时性的满意度）来衡量质量。© 2014 作者。约翰威利父子公司出版的行为决策杂志。