Date of Award
5-2021
Degree Type
Report
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Economics and Finance
Committee Chair(s)
Ben Blau (Committee Chair)
Committee
Ben Blau
Abstract
Professors at a university plausibly have an incentive to give higher grades to students, and these higher grades will be reflected in student evaluations, which are used to assess teaching quality, which could have career impacts. This paper takes advantage of a policy shift at the business school at Utah State University that introduced suggested caps on the average course grades that teachers gave. This allowed instrumental variable analysis to correct for bias in OLS estimations of these impacts. The correlation between grades and students' evaluations of teachers was found to be positive suggesting that student evaluations of teachers are biased by the grades that teachers give, making them less useful as a guiding metric.
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Gavin, "Exploiting a Grading Policy Shift as an Instrument to Estimate Impact of Grading on Teacher Evaluations" (2021). All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023. 1539.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/gradreports/1539
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