different amounts of information--from less than 'average' to more than 'a lot' on the rating scale--simply due to differences in the professor's style, is staggering" (Ceci 16-17).
Even if you have nothing to say, you can get higher scores by saying it charismatically! Be shrewd and let the Dr. Fox effect work for you!
GIVE LOTS OF HIGH GRADES!
Although researchers still debate whether or not instructors can out-and-out buy high ratings with high grades (Abrami, Howard say no), ample evidence does suggest that this would indeed be a prudent strategy to follow if you want to jack up those evaluation scores (and what nitwit doesn't?). Chacko believes that "the most prominent bias in student ratings of teaching effectiveness is the evaluation a student receives from the instructors in the form of a grade" (19). Vasta also believes that "the effect of grades on student evaluations of instruction must be interpreted as potentially quite powerful" (210). Max Hocutt writes:
A study of several thousand courses at my home university has recently confirmed what most professors have always suspected: students definitely give a higher rating to teachers who grade higher. The coefficient of correlation is a low but significant .38. This correlation might have been higher had the study considered not actual but expected grade. (Hocutt 60)Snyder and Clair concluded from their carefully controlled investigation that "a teacher can get a 'good' rating simply by assigning 'good' grades" (81). Their research confirmed earlier studies that showed that higher grades can contaminate evaluation ratings (the "reward effects"). And, thanks to that old halo effect, even evaluation items such as humor, self-reliance, and attitude toward students were affected. "This implies that student perceptions of most behavior dimensions of instructors are responsive to the instructor's evaluation of student performance" (23).
Similarly, Powell found that students rate instructors on the basis of a global impression which they form ("liking"), and that 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