at the individual items on the evaluation form--no matter what they are--all reflect this impression to some extent. His findings showed that this impression, and the resultant evaluation scores, "are strongly influenced by the grade the student receives from the instructor" (201). Even the comments that students write on narrative evaluation forms, Powell concluded, were "strongly influenced by the student's grade" (203). DuCette concluded from his experiments "that students do give better evaluations to an instructor if they obtain good grades" (313). In some courses, DuCette speculated, instructors could "significantly" raise their evaluation scores simply by "using lenient grading standards" (314). Worthington came to the same conclusion: "it is obvious that, given objectively equivalent teaching skills, lenient markers will tend to receive more positive evaluation ratings than stringent markers..." (772).
Here's more good news: you can inflate your evaluation scores even more by giving really high grades to really poor students (let me name this the Santa Clause effect). Snyder and Clair found that students who received higher grades than they expected tended to give "very positive teacher evaluations" (the "happy birthday effect," 75), rating tests, lectures, and the professor's teaching style more favorably. Worthington came to the same conclusion: "Those with least mastery are, in general, more likely to give more positive evaluations when their grades are inflated" (774).
But be on guard, there may also be a "grinch who stole Christmas effect." Holmes found that when students didn't get the grades they expected or felt entitled to, "they deprecated the instructor's teaching performance" across the board (133). Don't give B's to students who expect A's!
Since "it is clear that if an instructor inflates grades, he will be much more likely to receive positive evaluations" (Worthington 774), hand out those A's and beat your colleagues to the merit-pay trough!
TEACH UNDEMANDING COURSES!
"Education is the only service industry where the less you give, the happier are your constituents" (Crumbley). When teenagers were asked to describe their WORST teachers, 50 percent choose "expectations too high" (poor knowledge of the subject mattered least!). Although research indicates that students learn more from professors who are demanding task masters, it also shows that students give these task masters lower evaluations (Damron "Instructor"; Sullivan & Sranes 587). William McBroon, a sociologist at the University of Montana, found that when he eased course requirements (dropping attendance and participation obligations), his course evaluations went up. He writes, "as requirements were set aside, evaluations of the content, instructor, and course became more positive." "The less the rigor," he concluded, "the higher the student ratings of content, instructor, and course."
Who can really doubt that lenient standards promote favorable ratings from all those little strugglers sitting in class? Professors know the score: more of them lower standards over their careers than raise them. "While half to two-thirds reported no change in various requirements they had for students, the faculty members who altered their requirements because of the questionnaires were much more likely to decrease than to increase the amount and difficulty of material covered. Specifically, the amount of material covered was reduced by 22 percent of the faculty and expanded by just 7 percent, the the difficulty of course material was lowered by 38 percent of the faculty and raised by only 9 percent. Particularly notable was a finding on the rigor of course examinations: fully 33 percent of the faculty admitted that, as a result of these questionnaires, they lessened the difficulty of their tests; just 6 percent indicated they increased test difficulty" (Barnet, in Damon "Instructor" 12).
So go ahead, do it. No one will catch you because administrators wouldn't dream of correlating your ratings on evaluation forms with truncated reading lists, watered-down 