In Ratings Of Profs, It’s Body Over Mind

To get good scores in the CUE, it might help to be cute.

As the Committee on Undergraduate Education closes its online professor evaluation survey today, a new study suggests that physically attractive professors perform better in web-based assessments.

The study, “Web-Based Student Evaluations of Professors: the Relations between Perceived Quality, Easiness and Sexiness,” was conducted by three professors at Central Michigan University. One of them, Professor of Finance James Felton, said that he had looked at the ratings and comments on the website RateMyProfessors.com and decided it might be interesting to explore the relationship between an instructor’s “hotness,” as rated by students, and his or her “overall quality” score.”

The results “were stronger than I thought I would find,” Felton said. “It’s pretty overwhelming.”

RateMyProfessors.com is a site that allows students to score their instructors out of five possible points in the categories of “Easiness,” “Helpfulness,” “Clarity,” and “Overall Quality,” the last of which is a combination of the “Helpfulness” and “Clarity” ratings. The site also includes a “Hotness” function, whereby the sum of “hot” (+1) and “not hot” (-1) votes is displayed, unless it is a negative, in which case the site shows up a zero in order to prevent embarrassment for the not-so-pretty professors.

The Central Michigan study found that the correlation between “Quality” and “Easiness” was 0.61 and that between “Quality” and “Sexiness” was 0.30.

The authors say their results “suggest that about half of the variation in student opinion survey scores used by universities for promotion, tenure, and teaching award decisions may be due to the easiness of the course and the sexiness of the professor.”

Felton mentioned that “correlations aren’t necessarily causal,” but pointed out that by taking into account the student comments that are posted alongside the ratings, it became clear that in most cases there was a causal relationship.

“The obvious thing is that students are looking for an easy class,” he said. “It’s not at all the way you would hope that all students think.”

Felton also commented on the “hotness” rating, quoting student comments from the site such as “if I could do it, I would date her.”

“The hotness part to me is just human nature,” he said. “Of course, some people argue that if you’re smart and you give a good lecture, you’re sexy.”

Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, who was an outspoken critic of plans to make CUE Guide ratings compulsory for most classes at a recent Faculty meeting, said that the study’s results were “shocking” but “unsurprising.”

“[They] might suggest that going online, as course evaluations at Harvard are now, makes students less serious in evaluating, as one professor said in the faculty debate,” he said.

Mansfield had 11 ratings on RateMyProfessors.com, giving him an average easiness of 2.3, an overall quality of 3.6, and a total hotness of 5. One comment from this fall read “He is da best teacha at Havared. He gets you to think thoughts in your head. Thats reall respectable like.”

“The evaluations mean something, I suppose, but not very much,” Mansfield concluded.

Felton, however, said that he was “not at all opposed to in-class evaluation.”

“The fundamental problem is how are you going to decide whether or not a faculty member is doing a good job in the classroom, and asking students is one way,” he said. “It’s just how the data is used,” he added, advocating the use of peer reviews by professors as well as student data “to judge how effectively a class is taught.”

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu