Bill Moody writes:
This kind of bias has been seen at the University of Washington by
analyzing student answers to individual pairs of questions on the
standard course evaluation forms. For example, in response to the
question "How much did you learn from this course?", students tend to
rate male and female faculty equally. However, in response to the
question asking students to rate "Effectiveness of the teacher in
communicating the material", students consistently rate female faculty
lower. Makes the bias pretty obvious, doesn't it?
I disagree. There were plenty of courses from which I learned quite a
bit (by outside reading, lab exercises, TA's, etc) which were,
nonetheless, taught by someone who didn't communicate the material well.
-- Amy
