When RateMyProfessors met Google Scholar: students’ evaluations and professors’ looks and research

We take more than a million student evaluations of almost 200,000 professors from the RateMyProfessors website and link them with information on the research productivity of almost 3,000 professors in Google Scholar to provide a systematic characterization of the relationship between student evaluations and the characteristics of the classes, universities and professors concerned and to test whether students’ appreciations are conditionally related to research productivity. The study concludes that although how “easy” and “interesting” students consider a course to be are the most important determinants of their evaluations, there is a “looks” or “beauty” premium, with no systematic racial, age or gender component. Surprisingly, research productivity is either not significant or is negatively related to the assessment of a professor’s teaching abilities.