An analysis of the students' evaluation of professors' competencies in the light of professors' gender

• Main Authors: Acosta-Soto, Luis, Okoye, Kingsley, Camacho-Zuniga, Claudia, Escamilla, Jose, Hosseini, Samira
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Decision making; Education; Educational innovation; Gender bias; Government; Higher education; Instruments; Sentiment analysis; Social sciences; Solids; Students' evaluation of professors; Sustainable development goal 5
• ISSN: 2377-634X
• DOI: 10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962637

Students' evaluation of professors is commonly performed at all academic levels whereby a number of skill sets are evaluated and the opinion of the students is recorded as a means for professors' assessment. How the students view professors for their teaching competencies is an essential indicator for optimizing the teaching and learning setup. However, the reports of the literature suggest that students can be partially biased in their judgement based upon the gender of the professor. In this study, we have analyzed the results of the Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) from 103,833 responses which were collected as a result of evaluating 5,083 professors of higher education. With a target to take a close look at the influence of professors' gender on their evaluation results we broke down the study into schools and analyzed the assessment based on 7 teaching competencies. In addition, the responses provided to an open-ended question underwent textual and sentiment analysis to further understand the students' view of their professors. Against a solid body of the literature that suggest female professor can be assessed in a harsher manner than their male colleagues, we have not detected traces of gender bias across schools. While Engineering students have rated their male professors slightly higher for the intellectual challenge they incorporated in the classroom, in the rest of the competencies and across the schools, female professors were rated slightly but systematically higher than their male counterparts. The sentiment analysis shows the exact same set of keywords associated to both sexes of professors even though the order and the frequency of use for each sex were different.