Students are much more reluctant to give female lecturers a “perfect 10” in teaching evaluations than men but rate them equally highly when a different scale is used, a study has found.
The experiment – which found that the apparently minor tweak to a six-point scale virtually eliminated gaps in survey scores in male-dominated fields – suggests that learners are likelier to associate “genius” or “brilliance” with male academics and raises further doubts about the reliability of student feedback, according to researchers.
In their , due to be published in the?American Sociological Review, Northwestern University’s Lauren Rivera and András Tilcsik from University of Toronto outline how one North American university’s decision to switch from a 10-point satisfaction scale to a six-point one had radically altered the distribution of marks.
Under the 10-point scale, in four subject areas?that? were most male-dominated in terms of staffing, 31.4 per cent of men’s ratings were a perfect 10 – making it the most common result – whereas only 19.5 per cent of women’s scores were. Eight was the most common score for women, whose average score was about a point lower than men’s.
However, under the six-point scale, there was no substantial difference in the frequency of the top rating being awarded: sixes accounted for 41.2 per cent of men’s ratings, and 41.7 per cent of women’s scores. Likewise, there was no longer a major difference in the average scores of men and women.
The stronger performance of women using a six-point scale was probably explained by the tendency of students to regard female academics as being “merely good rather than brilliant”, Dr Rivera told?成人VR视频.
Students felt more able to award a six-out-of-six score to women since it did not have the same associations of “genius” or “brilliance” more commonly attached to male tutors and accompanied by 10-out-of-10 ratings, she said.
“Whereas 10 out of 10 elicited images of perfect performance that don’t fit with our typical image of female faculty, the six-point scale didn’t carry such heavy cultural connotations of flawless performance,” Dr Rivera said.
This “enabled a wider range of performance…to be recognised as meriting top marks, which closed the gender gap?that used to exist in the most male-dominated fields in our sample”, she added.
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Print headline: Gender bias in student evaluations revealed
