Abstract

Student evaluation of teaching (SET), which refers to students’ feedback about and evaluation of their professors, is the most frequently used teacher assessment method in the world (Newton, 1988; Seldin, 1989). Despite its popularity—and the fact that it does have its advantages—SET has long been a target of criticism from scholars and educators alike. Since China has the biggest population in the world and its tertiary education sector has grown rapidly in recent decades (Government of China, 2016), the primary purpose of this study is to find out the potential factors that can lead to biases in teachers’ SET scores in China. The research for this study was conducted in a middle-sized Chinese university. It involved 1,371 business department undergraduate students and a total of 13,154 evaluations. Pearson’s correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were applied to the data in order to explore the relationship between six different factors—course type, class size, course level, student gender, professor gender, and professor seniority—and SET scores. The results revealed that five out of these six factors (all but student gender) can bias SET scores, but that their ability to do so is highly limited. These results indicate that SET scores can legitimately be used in the Chinese tertiary education sector to improve course quality and teaching quality, but that they cannot, on their own, be used to justify the promotion of professors.