Do you evaluate your professors on looks? Students sometimes don't realize the importance administrators place on their semesterly evaluations of professors. Perhaps, however, these evaluations shouldn't be considered as important a gauge of teaching effectiveness. The article below is excerpted from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

--Ross

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations?
By GABRIELA MONTELL

Professors aren't known for fussing about their looks, but the results of a new study suggest they may have to if they want better teaching evaluations. Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the Universityof Texas at Austin, and Amy Parker, one of his students, found that attractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. The findings, they say, raise serious questions about the use of student evaluations as a valid measure of teaching quality. In their study, Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker asked students to look at photographs of 94 professors and rate their beauty. Then they compared those ratings to the average student evaluation scores for the courses taught by those professors. The two found that the professors who had been rated among the most beautiful scored a point higher than those rated least beautiful (that's a substantial difference, since student evaluations don't generally vary by much). While it's not news that beauty trumps brains in many quarters, you would think that the ivory tower would be
relatively exempt from such shallowness.

Not so, says Rocky Kolb, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, who notes that teaching, like acting, is a kind of performance art in which looks play a part. Besides, even nerds must answer to beauty standards (albeit lower ones), says Mr. Kolb, who posed in 1996 for a calendar featuring hot scientists, called the "Studmuffins of Science." He added: "It's a little known fact that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has a swimsuit competition for the Nobel Prize."

Anyone who thinks looks don't count in academe is foolish, says Judith Waters, a psychology professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies the relationship of physical beauty to aging, income, and work. "It's sad that they make such a difference, and I'm sure there are many people who are going to read this and say, 'Well, they don't matter to me.' But they matter to large numbers of other people, including students," she says.

James M. Lang made that discovery. Mr. Lang has always earned high marks from his students at Assumption College, but he doesn't consider himself a "Baldwin" (for the clueless, that's a term for a hot guy, popularized by the movie Clueless). Apparently, though, some of his students do. More than one of them has made comments about his "buns" on student evaluations.

Now the assistant professor of English says he's self-conscious about his looks and his teaching. "I work very hard at my teaching," he says, "and I am a little disturbed at the possibility that students are evaluating my courses based on such a superficial criterion." He wonders if he's as good a teacher as he thought he was, and he's afraid to turn his back to his classes to write on the chalkboard.

Kate Antonovics says she can relate. The 33-year-old assistant professor of economics is a "Betty" (that's slang for a gorgeous woman, also from Clueless) in her students' eyes. She has gotten e-mail messages from her students at the University of California at San Diego that include remarks such as, "Where do you shop? My friends and I can't get over how cute your outfits always are (I suppose because of the usual professor clothing-style stereotype ... which I apologize for)," and "I think you are very very hot." (One student even asked her on a date in the middle of the semester. She declined.)

The big question, he says, is: Do students discriminate against homely professors, or are attractive professors better teachers?

Unfortunately, the study is inconclusive on that count. But if the answer is that students discriminate, "and if you think this beauty variable really shouldn't matter, and yet it does, then maybe we should discount teaching evaluations somewhat," Mr. Hamermesh says, "because clearly they are affected by something which most of us would argue should not be something that we should be accounting for."

Of course, not all student comments are flattering. A glance at Web sites such as ProfessorPerformance.com and RateMyProfessors.com--where students rate their instructors on criteria such as coolness, clarity, easiness, helpfulness, and hotness (on RateMyProfessors.com, hot professors get chili peppers beside their names)--leaves little doubt about the viciousness of some students. Petty comments abound: "Someone fire this fat bastard" and "Looks like a hobbit, is not a nice person!"

Short of botox injections and plastic surgery, there's not a lot professors can do about the looks they were born with, so most of them should focus on improving the things they can control--like dress, grooming and, above all, their teaching, says Ms. Basow of Lafayette College.

The good news is that looks are just one of many factors that affect student evaluations. In addition, the bar for beauty is probably low for academics (beautiful professors are about as rare as genius members of the World Wrestling Federation, says the University of Chicago's Mr. Kolb), so clearing it may be
easier.

(Copyright by the Chronicle of Higher Education)

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