students rated identical teachers
Did you actually read critically the papers you cite?[1] claims to be comparing "identical teachers" but [1]'s sole claim to courses taught by male and female instructors is "neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender". Clearly those are hardly the only factors relevant to teacher quality. Moreover [1] claims to use "objective measure of the instructors’ performance", and which includes -- I kid you not -- "self-reported number of hours students spent studying for the course". [2] is similarly vague, and claims that "the courses were identical: all lectures, assignments, and content were exactly the same in all sections" only to to state in the next sentence that the "only aspects of the course that varied between Dr. Mitchell’s and Dr. Martin’s sections were the course grader and contact with the instructor". Well, isn't "contact with the instructor" significant? Both [1, 2] use p-values [3], which doesn't increase confidence in the results. As an aside, neither paper discusses potential bias the authors might have, in particular their own social desirability bias [4]. [1] https://academic.oup.com/jeea/advance-article-abstract/doi/1... [2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/14/study-says-st... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias |
If it was possible to objectively determine teacher quality, student evaluation probably would not exist in the first place. The reason we ask people's opinion is in order to quantify the subjective. Double edged sword, because we tend to conflate quantified & objective.
That's half the theme here. erm.. people's opinions are subjective..
Part of the problem with "student-as-consumer" is that students aren't always the real consumer.