Abstract
The use of student evaluations to rate college faculty on teaching merit is common practice on many campuses today. Knowledge, or at least the suspicion, that there are numerous sources of bias in these evaluations is probably equally common. Yet, although much effort has gone into locating and identifying sources of bias, little attention has been paid to procedures for handling them when employing student evaluations for making serious, practical decisions about faculty merit. This paper offers a relatively simple procedure for doing so, using multiple regression analysis, and illustrates its use with data collected by the author during the Fall and Winter of 1974-1975. It is suggested that if this or other procedures cannot be used to adjust faculty ratings for irrelevant course and teacher attributes which color students’ opinions and confound the analysis, then the use of student evaluations for making serious judgments of merit ought to be abandoned.
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