Do good looks equal good 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.
Link via Arts & Letters Daily. Hm. I don’t really have any comment, witty or otherwise, to this. I just found it interesting. I suppose this is the kind of thing that would belong in a sidebar list of links. It’s what all the bloggers are doing these days, eh?
Good grief. This does not bode well for my career. Something a social psych. person once told me: before having students fill out evaluations, tell them to make a list of 10 things they liked and 10 things they did not like. They are usually hard-pressed to complete the latter list, giving you an instant (though, perhaps fleeting) cognitive boost.
And here I was hoping for hot professor pics in the article. Alas.