Making the Grade

For decades, universities have meas­ured the performance of instructors in part by asking students to grade their professors. This has created a Yelp-y tyranny where teachers live in constant fear that their "clients" might torpedo them with one-star reviews. But not being dummies—at least for the most part—the professoriate long ago figured out how to keep the kiddies happy: good grades.

Professors who care about academic standards have long complained about rampant grade inflation—a phenomenon at the Ivies perhaps even more than at Big State U. The Gentleman's C has become the Gentleman's B+.

One might attribute this to any number of things: general slippage of societal standards (The Scrapbook's favorite all-purpose complaint); or perhaps it is just in keeping with how the little darlings have been treated since kindergarten, when they got their first participation trophies.

But the Ph.D. crowd has had a more particular theory: Tough graders get dyspeptic "evaluations" from students. Professors have been of the belief that the path to positive teaching reviews is paved with easy-As. And now there is new research showing that this anecdotal view is backed up by Data.

Education-policy scholars at the University of Michigan looked at thousands of students taking math classes at the University of Phoenix. Because that for-profit school's classes are standardized, researchers were able to compare student performance and assess the impact of good teaching compared with average instruction. They found students learn more from better teachers. And yet, effective teaching didn't correlate with higher teacher evaluations. No, there was another factor that seemed to determine how professors get rated: "student evaluations of their instructor's performance are most positively correlated with their grades in that class," the researchers found, "suggesting that instructors may be rewarded through higher evaluations for high course grades." You think?