Do good looking teachers get better course evaluations?
Hal Varian reports on research at the University of Texas in today's New York Times. Dan Hammermesh and Jeff Biddle examined discrimination based on appearance by testing the hypothesis that better looking teachers received better evaluations from their students. Rather than link you to the Times let me refer you to Virginia Postrel's blog (which has links to related resources as well: "Good Looks=Good Scores". From the Times:
- "...The economists collected teaching evaluations for 463 courses taught by 94 faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin, along with some characteristics of the instructors, like sex, race, whether they were on tenure track, and whether they were educated in an English-speaking country.
"They asked six undergraduate students to rate the photographs of the professors on a 10-point scale and used the average measure as a beauty score. The student ratings on the beauty scale were highly correlated with one another, suggesting that they were measuring the same aspects of appearance.
"According to the economists' statistical analysis, good-looking professors got significantly higher teaching scores. The average teaching evaluation was 4.2 on a 5-point scale. Those at the bottom end of the attractiveness scale received, on average, a teaching evaluation of about 3.5, while those on the top end received about 4.5..."
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