Comparative study reveals question redesign reduces demographic rating gaps in university teaching evaluations, indicating survey restructuring effectively mitigates evaluation bias.
Bias in student teaching evaluations is a well-documented issue. As predicted in the literature, our campus found that changing questions to focus more on student direct observation and metacognitive reflection, as well changing to a frequency scale, was correlated with an increase in favorable ratings for instructors who are women or from under-represented populations. We compare data from a full year of an older question set to a full year of a revised question set. Our campus focuses on the percent of responses in the top two (of five) categories as a summary of student feedback. A logistic regression analysis shows that the gaps between populations of instructors change significantly over the time of the change in questions.
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Li et al. (2026) studied this question.
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