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Student evaluations of teaching should not be abandoned

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 4, page 499 (2025)Cite this article

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In a Comment, Hodson (Hodson, G. It is time to abandon student evaluations of teaching. Nat. Rev. Psychol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-025-00444-y; 2025)1 argues that student teaching evaluations are discriminatory against women and minorities and should be abandoned, and urges researchers to develop alternatives to them. Hodson adopts a social justice perspective, suggesting that research shows that women and racialized professors do less well on those evaluations than men or White professors. Hodson cites a large Dutch study2 that found that female professors were rated lower than male professors. However, this difference was very small — about one-fifth of a point on a five-point Likert scale. Moreover, Hodson did not cite an adversarial collaboration that exhaustively examined gender bias in six academic domains including teaching ratings3. Their conclusion was that female instructors are disadvantaged but that meta-analytic results are mixed and affected by moderators such as rater gender, professor gender and class gender mix.

Turning to ethnicity, Hodson provides as evidence of bias a study of high school students in Texas, not university students, who were shown CVs of fictious college professors and on that basis judged those professors for their competence, interpersonal skills and legitimacy4. These high school students’ ratings differed by ethnicity but not by gender. However, it is not clear what these results tell us: these results could simply indicate that when high school students are asked to make a judgment with limited information, they make use of that limited information.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Donald Sharpe

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Correspondence to Donald Sharpe.

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Sharpe, D. Student evaluations of teaching should not be abandoned. Nat Rev Psychol 4, 499 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-025-00464-8

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