The Impact Of Students Expectations Of Grades And Perceptions Of Course Difficulty, Workload, And Pace On Faculty Evaluations

Abstract

Decisions concerning tenure, promotion, and merit raises are of crucial importance to college and university faculty.  These decisions are greatly affected by the evaluation of faculty by their students.  It is often argued that student evaluations of faculty are influenced by a number of factors that do not reflect the important elements of university level instruction, such as subject knowledge and clarity of exposition.  Rather, some faculty believe that if a professor is an easy grader, has a low workload, or if the class itself is considered easy, he or she is more likely to receive a favorable student evaluation.  This paper utilizes a sample of faculty evaluations from the College of Business of a small southeastern university to investigate these hypotheses.