Even when grade inflation is taken into account, low-scoring students still give their lecturers ¡°retaliatory¡± teacher evaluations, .

Used to help academics understand their weaknesses in their courses ¨C as well as manage staff performance ¨C student evaluation of teaching (SET) has proved controversial, with academics?arguing?that SET scores ¡°often do little more than reveal student biases ¨C reflecting distorted perceptions of a teacher?rather than anything to do with their actual teaching¡±.

While past studies have shown that students with high grades are biased in favour of their instructors, whereas low-performing students are biased negatively towards them, the recent research demonstrates that the trend persists?¨C?even after grade inflation.

Joonmo Cho, vice-president of Sungkyunkwan University and an author of the study, noted that the global pandemic provided a natural experiment?through which to observe whether students would continue to penalise instructors despite grades going up on average.

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¡°Grade inflation?is one of the phenomena that is occurring not only in Korea but around the world. This is in response to a radical change in the education system,¡± he told?Times Higher Education.

During the pandemic, teaching and assessment went online, with less nuanced online exams resulting in higher grades, he explained.

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Yet, grades rising overall did little to stop students from ¡°retaliating¡± against instructors who they believed gave them a lower score than deserved, authors of the paper published in?Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education found.

In reviewing more than 125,000 exams from Sungkyunkwan University, the researchers observed that, while students were somewhat less likely to do ¡°retaliatory¡± SETs because their grades improved, those whose grades did not rise as much as their peers¡¯ still tended to take out their unhappiness on their instructors.

¡°Since these two effects work together and cancel each other out, the retaliatory SET remains as it was before grade inflation,¡± said Professor Cho.

Despite the findings, he did not advocate scrapping student evaluations as an assessment tool entirely. Instead, he supported a more tailored use of the assessments, saying that student responses should shape course content rather than inform teacher hiring and retention.

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¡°SET is still a good resource as a channel to receive students¡¯ thoughts on lectures,¡± he said. ¡°I think that using the SET to solve the shortcomings of lectures by collecting students¡¯ opinions would be more preferable than using it as an evaluation index.¡±

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com