Effects of grading leniency and low workload on students' evaluations of teaching: Popular myth, bias, validity, or innocent bystanders?

Herbert W. Marsh · Lawrence A. Roche

309 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Educational Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Evaluation of Teaching Practices Student Assessment and Feedback Educational Environments and Student Outcomes

Abstract

Two studies debunk popular myths that student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are substantially biased by low workload and grading leniency. A workload bias is untenable because the workload-SET relation is positive. The small grade-SET relation (.20 for overall ratings) has many well-supported explanations that do not involve bias. Some SET factors (e.g., Organization, Enthusiasm) are unrelated to grades, and the highest relation is with Learning (.30), implying valid teaching effects rather than bias. Structural equation models confirmed that perceived learning and prior characteristics (course level, prior subject interest) account for much of the grade-SET relation. The relation is also nonlinear, so that high grades (sometimes misused as a leniency measure) are unrelated to SETs. Contrary to dire predictions based on bias claims, Workload, expected grades, and their relations with SETs were stable over 12 years.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 309 citations exist upstream.

References

1993Lisrel 8: Structural Equation Modeling With the Simplis Command Language 2007Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research 1998Advanced Structural Equation Modeling: Issues and Techniques 2013Advanced Structural Equation Modeling 1987Students' evaluations of University teaching: Research findings, methodological issues, and directions for future research 1984Students' evaluations of university teaching: Dimensionality, reliability, validity, potential baises, and utility.1997Making students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness effective: The critical issues of validity, bias, and utility.1997Student ratings: The validity of use.

Cited by

2007Are students customers? TQM and marketing perspectives 2013Redesign of a Large Lecture Course Into a Small-Group Learning Course 2003Will Teachers Receive Higher Student Evaluations by Giving Higher Grades and Less Course Work?2015Student and teacher ratings of instructional quality: Consistency of ratings over time, agreement, and predictive power.2010Homework works if homework quality is high: Using multilevel modeling to predict the development of achievement in mathematics.

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.