The Role of Gendered Language and Performance Ratings in Teaching Evaluations of University Economics Professors Across Ontario

Abstract

Student evaluation is widely being recognized across university and colleges for professor evaluation, but there are many underlying trends or bias occurring that can influence the interpretation. RateMyProfessor.com is becoming an increasingly popular publicly accessible web-based evaluations, due to widespread usage by students for course selection and high quantity of data available for analysis. Professors performance is assessed for teaching and research. The teaching component is based on students' ratings and comments. However, comments and ratings are highly subjective, thus making the assessment difficult. We use this large corpus to answer the following questions: 1) what words do students use to describe their professors? 2) is there any correlation between the words used and the rating is given? and, are there significant differences between the groups analyzed? To answer these questions, we model the reviews using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and we run several regression models to analyze if there are statistically significant factors that influence the overall rating.