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)