"'C' is for Cookie": Academic Evaluation Edition

Comment: "'C' is for cookie. That's good enough for me!"

Comment 2: Apparently, some of my what we did in mathematics in Somerville was an even better idea than I thought. ;)

'The provision of chocolate cookies had a significant effect on course evaluation. These findings question the validity of (student evaluations of teaching) and their use in making widespread decisions within a faculty.' HT @KStackWhitney (photo: Dschwen) https://t.co/lO1v18tmf5 pic.twitter.com/N6epK3GinU

— Erika Marín-Spiotta (@emsaurios) December 7, 2018

(Tip of the cap to Jacquelyn Gill.)

Evaluating Fake Lecturers

Clearly, we need to repeat a recently-published set of experiments by inserting fake lecturers into the evaluation forms that we give to students.

Here is a quote from the paper's results blurb: "Without a portrait, 66% (183 of 277) of students evaluated the fictitious lecturer, but fewer students (49%, 140 of 285) did so with a portrait (chi-squared test, p < 0.0001)."

(Tip of the cap to the Improbable Research blog.)