Fudging the Numbers: Distributing Chocolate Influences Student Evaluations of an Undergraduate Course

Abstract

Student evaluations provide important information about teaching effectiveness. Research has shown that student evaluations can be mediated by unintended aspects of a course. In this study, we examined whether an event unrelated to a course would increase student evaluations. Six discussion sections completed course evaluations administered by an independent experimenter. The experimenter offered chocolate to 3 sections before they completed the evaluations. Overall, students offered chocolate gave more positive evaluations than students not offered chocolate. This result highlights the need to standardize evaluation procedures to control for the influence of external factors on student evaluations.

Design fixation: Classifications and modern methods of prevention

“…Recently, psychologists studying priming effects have demonstrated to a surprising degree how easily conscious thoughts and actions can be influenced by unconscious reactions to the environment. For example, students who share chocolate with their classmates on the same day that their professor is evaluated will irrationally raise their classmates' rat-ings of their professor (Youmans & Jee, 2007), and professors who make corrections to students' assignments with red ink will irrationally assign those assignments a lower grade than if they had corrected those same assignments using ink that was blue or black (Rutchick et al, 2010). Researchers have even shown that creative problem solving can be improved in insight problems when participants are first primed by seeing an illuminated light bulb, an iconic image representing sudden insight (Slepian et al, 2010).…”

The unintended consequences of grading teaching

“…More fundamentally, the danger of unmediated use of SETs is that it could pressurise academics to do what they imagine students want, rather than what they believe students need; setting less work, inflating grades, telling students what will be on the exam, etc. In an elegantly designed study (Youmans and Jee 2007) experimentally demonstrated a statistically significantly increase in SET (F (1.92) 03.83, p 00.05, d00.33) by giving chocolate to students prior to their completion of evaluations. While SET grades may be easily manipulated, this sort of behaviour is in no one's interest.…”

Student evaluation of teaching: Individual differences and bias effects

“…Empirical research has shown that some of these strategies do indeed work, which poses a threat to the validity of the ratings. For example, Youmans and Jee (2007) demonstrated that handing out chocolate at the time of the evaluation increased the average rating by about 0.2 points on a 5-point scale compared to the control group, and research reported by Fortunato and Mincy (2003) showed that a positive mood induction right before SET administration significantly increased the ratings.…”