Low-scoring students penalise lecturers despite grade inflation

Even when grade inflation is taken into account, low-scoring students still give their lecturers “retaliatory” teacher evaluations, researchers in South Korea have found.

Used to help academics understand their weaknesses in their courses – as well as manage staff performance – student evaluation of teaching (SET) has proved controversial, with academics arguing that SET scores “often do little more than reveal student biases – reflecting distorted perceptions of a teacher rather than anything to do with their actual teaching”.

While past studies have shown that students with high grades are biased in favour of their instructors, whereas low-performing students are biased negatively towards them, the recent research demonstrates that the trend persists – even after grade inflation.

Joonmo Cho, vice-president of Sungkyunkwan University and an author of the study, noted that the global pandemic provided a natural experiment through which to observe whether students would continue to penalise instructors despite grades going up on average.

“Grade inflation is one of the phenomena that is occurring not only in Korea but around the world. This is in response to a radical change in the education system,” he told Times Higher Education.

During the pandemic, teaching and assessment went online, with less nuanced online exams resulting in higher grades, he explained.

Yet, grades rising overall did little to stop students from “retaliating” against instructors who they believed gave them a lower score than deserved, authors of the paper published in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education found.

In reviewing more than 125,000 exams from Sungkyunkwan University, the researchers observed that, while students were somewhat less likely to do “retaliatory” SETs because their grades improved, those whose grades did not rise as much as their peers’ still tended to take out their unhappiness on their instructors.

“Since these two effects work together and cancel each other out, the retaliatory SET remains as it was before grade inflation,” said Professor Cho.

Despite the findings, he did not advocate scrapping student evaluations as an assessment tool entirely. Instead, he supported a more tailored use of the assessments, saying that student responses should shape course content rather than inform teacher hiring and retention.

“SET is still a good resource as a channel to receive students’ thoughts on lectures,” he said. “I think that using the SET to solve the shortcomings of lectures by collecting students’ opinions would be more preferable than using it as an evaluation index.”

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com