Abstract

At many universities, student evaluations of teaching (SET) are used for determining promotion, tenure, and other financial benefits for professors, which gives incentive for them to try to increase their scores. However, previous research, mainly based on US data, indicates that SET scores not only depend on teaching effectiveness and quality, but also on several other factors, most notably on grades. In this study, we contribute to this stream of literature by investigating the effects of grade inflation on SET scores using four years of data from two leading Central European universities. The SET survey is filled out at these universities after the final grades are known. As a methodological novelty, we use weighted regression methods (ordinary least squares, two-stage least squares, fixed effects panel) to account for the differences in class size. The weighting reflects the importance of the average SET score of a class on the evaluation of the instructor. Our findings suggest that increasing the grade of a student by one will cause them to give approximately 0.2–0.4 higher evaluations for the instructor in the SET survey.

摘要

在许多大学，学生教学评价 (SET) 用于确定教授的晋升、任期和其他经济利益，这激励他们努力提高分数。然而，之前主要基于美国数据的研究表明，SET 分数不仅取决于教学效果和质量，还取决于其他几个因素，尤其是成绩。在这项研究中，我们通过使用来自中欧两所领先大学的四年数据调查成绩膨胀对 SET 分数的影响，为这一文献流做出了贡献。在知道最终成绩后，这些大学会填写 SET 调查。作为方法论的创新，我们使用加权回归方法（普通最小二乘法、两阶段最小二乘法、固定效果面板）来解释班级规模的差异。权重反映了一个班级的平均 SET 分数对教师评价的重要性。我们的研究结果表明，将学生的成绩提高 1 级将使他们在 SET 调查中对教师给予大约 0.2-0.4 更高的评价。