Long-standing wisdom in academic circles is that when students get mad about their grades, they get even in the form of poor teacher reviews.
But a Washington State University Vancouver researcher’s work suggests that, so long as students believe their professors are grading fairly, they won’t retaliate come term end with negative evaluations.
“The most interesting thing we found in our study is that perception of fair process completely eliminated the threat of student retaliation via low teaching evaluations,” said lead author Thomas Tripp, Carson College of Business associate dean at WSU Vancouver. Former WSU doctoral students — Lixin Jiang of the University of Auckland, Kristine Olson of Dixie State University and Maja Graso of the University of Otago — co-authored the report, which appeared in the peer-reviewed Journal of Marketing Education.
It’s a subtle shift that underscores major issues in the world of academia, ranging from grade inflation to the job insecurity of adjunct professors.
Research shows that, generally, there is a correlation between students’ grades and the reviews they give their instructors, Tripp said. Students who receive high grades tend to highly rate their professors; conversely, students who receive poor grades are more likely to give negative reviews, he said.
That can be frightening for teachers on a year-by-year contract, he said. Bad evaluations could prevent teachers from being promoted, or even keeping their jobs at all.
“These evaluations carry so much weight in one’s annual review, promotion and tenure,” he said.
That can contribute to long-term grade inflation. According to gradeinflation.com, which contains ongoing research by Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor, grade point averages at four-year college are rising at a rate of about 0.1 points per decade, and that A is the most common grade given at both four-year and two-year college campuses.
That can be a problem for future employers, Tripp said, who “lose the ability to tell who is super achieving versus who is just achieving.”
“If everybody’s getting 4.0’s, how can you tell who is achieving?” Tripp said.
Apart from giving higher grades, professors may try to find other ways to game evaluations, Tripp said. They may bring free pizza on evaluation day, or wait until a day when class “troublemakers” aren’t in the room before handing evaluations out.
Still, “we had a pretty good hunch there was a way to remove that dilemma,” he said.
And indeed, by making changes as simple as offering grading rubrics, listing course policies in syllabi and grading blindly — grading without seeing a student’s name or other identifying factors — instructors can help ensure their grades are considered fair and transparent.
“Fair process only works if fair processes are transparent,” he said. “People have to see them. They have to know that they’re there. If they have no information, it doesn’t help at all.”
