It Pays to be Young, Hot, Easy, and Not Black: Online Student Perceptions of College Professors

• In Event: 2484 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 24. Technology and Education

Abstract

Student evaluations of college courses and course instructors are widespread in higher education and have both practical and theoretical significance. Analyzing RateMyProfessors.com reviews of 1,106 full-time tenure-track and tenured faculty in nine disciplines at six different universities, this study finds that students’ perceptions of an instructor’s difficulty level and the instructor’s overall quality rating were dependent on a few factors. The factors that significantly predicted the perceived difficulty level of an instructor included: the race of the instructor, the academic rank of the instructor, and perceived attractiveness. In the regression analysis, four variables were associated with overall quality ratings: being Black, academic rank of the instructor, perceived difficulty, and perceived attractiveness. The strongest predictor of overall quality ratings was perceived difficulty, followed by perceived attractiveness.

Author

• Pamela Leong, Salem State University