The teaching evaluation is something of a staple for end-of-term college life. In theory, student feedback provides key information on how well a professor is doing in the classroom. In reality, a new analysis posted on the post-publication-review site ScienceOpen shows, students give their female instructors worse grades than their male counterparts—and there's no simple way to fix or compensate for that bias.
Of course, this is not the first time that researchers have criticized student evaluations of teaching (SETs); it's an open secret that they have more to do with students' grades than actual teaching effectiveness. Nor is it the first time they've been criticized for gender bias. Just last year, economist Anne Boring found strong bias against female instructors in first-year undergraduate courses in France, and, in 2014, researchers at the University of North Carolina showed that simply changing the name of an online course instructor from a man's name to a woman's led to worse SETs.
[For more of this story, written by Nathan Collins, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...e-gender-biased-kids]
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