The substance of academic style
Via Glenn Reynolds, I discover one more thing to worry about as an untenured professor. From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Professors aren’t known for fussing about their looks, but the results of a new study suggest they may have to if they want better teaching evaluations. Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the ...
Via Glenn Reynolds, I discover one more thing to worry about as an untenured professor. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Via Glenn Reynolds, I discover one more thing to worry about as an untenured professor. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Professors aren’t known for fussing about their looks, but the results of a new study suggest they may have to if they want better teaching evaluations. Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Amy Parker, one of his students, found that attractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. The findings, they say, raise serious questions about the use of student evaluations as a valid measure of teaching quality. In their study, Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker asked students to look at photographs of 94 professors and rate their beauty. Then they compared those ratings to the average student evaluation scores for the courses taught by those professors. The two found that the professors who had been rated among the most beautiful scored a point higher than those rated least beautiful (that’s a substantial difference, since student evaluations don’t generally vary by much)…. Some male professors also may be dismayed about another finding of the study: “Good looks generated more of a premium, and bad looks more of a penalty, for male instructors,” say Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker in a paper about their findings, “Beauty in the Classroom: Professors’ Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity.” According to their data, the effect of beauty (or lack thereof) on teaching evaluations for men was three times as great as it was for women. (emphasis added)
Here’s a link to the actual Hamermesh and Parker paper. A few serious and not-so-serious thoughts on this:
Each of the professors’ pictures was rated by each of six undergraduate students: Three women and three men, with one of each gender being a lower-division, two upper-division students (to accord with the distribution of classes across the two levels). The raters were told to use a 10 (highest) to 1 rating scale, to concentrate on the physiognomy of the professor in the picture, to make their ratings independent of age, and to keep 5 in mind as an average. In the analyses we unit normalized each rating. To reduce measurement error the six normalized ratings were summed to create a composite standardized beauty rating for each instructor.
Wait a minute — an N of 6 on judging looks?!! On matters as subjective as attracyiveness, I’m going to want to see a larger number of raters — get these style mavens on the task, stat!!
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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