According to BigThink.com …
The website ratemyprofessors.com has students anonymously comment on their professors’ “helpfulness,” “clarity” and “easiness.”
The punctuation point: Raters are asked where the prof is “hot” or “not.”
Four professors from Central Michigan University trolled through the data and wrote a paper examining “Attractiveness, Easiness, and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on rateMyProfessors.com.”
After conceding that the site is rife with “issues”, the authors dug in and researched the relationship between student perceptions of professor “hotness” and their evaluation of “quality of instruction.”.
Guess what?
A large percentage of American college students consider courses to be high-quality when the professor is attractive..
As Gomer Pyle would say: “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”
The only surprise is the magnitude and consistency of the relationship.
Profs that are “not hot” are toast.
The Central Michigan “scholars” also evaluated the relative hotness of profs by discipline …
Within the B-school realm, finance profs are – as a group – hotter than marketing profs … who edge out econ and accounting profs.
I don’t know what’s worse: students rating courses based on how hot profs are or profs who research whether hottness impacts their ratings …
* * * * *
Follow on Twitter @KenHoma >> Latest Posts
The Homa Files 
Leave a comment