Teaching & Course Evaluations

Eiszler, C.F. (2002). College students' evaluations of teaching and grade inflation. Research in Higher Education, 43(4), 483-501. This study examined the relationship between grades and students’ composite ratings of teaching effectiveness over a 20-year period at a comprehensive, public university in the upper Midwest. Between the spring of 1980 and the fall of 1999, students in more than 37,000 thousand course sections submitted 983,491 teaching evaluations using the Student Opinion Survey: A Survey of Teaching Characteristics (SOS). As a first step in the analysis, linear and polynominal regression lines were fitted to the variables of central interest: the percentage of students expecting grades of A or A− and the composite teaching effectiveness rating for all instructors. In a second stage, calculation of the correlation across all semesters between expected grades and ratings of teaching effectiveness and the partial correlation between these variables. The data showed significant time related trends for both expected grades and teaching effectiveness ratings. The predictive relationship between student ratings of teaching and expected grades was significant. These results suggested that college students’ ratings of instruction may be used in ways that raise questions of consequential validity, specifically by encouraging grade inflation.