Teaching While Asian

Study finds students give lower ratings to Asian professors.

By Scott Jaschik

INSIDE HIGHER ED - MARCH 2, 2015

Rate My Professors is a student evaluation site that frustrates many professors, who say that the nonscientific standards leave faculty members open to unfair ratings.

Last month, a study documented the extent to which students use different sets of words (many of them with gender implications) to discuss their male and female professors. Now a new study looks at how students on Rate My Professors rate instructors who have Asian-sounding last names, and the results suggest that these instructors are getting significantly lower scores than those with other last names in Rate My Professors’ categories of clarity and helpfulness.

The author of the study, who also examined comments students made about the instructors, said that his findings raise questions about whether American colleges and universities are as international in outlook at they boast of being—and whether Asian instructors are being reviewed fairly. The study—“She Does Have an Accent But”—has just been published in the journal Language in Society (abstract available here).

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