Body Politics in Cyberspace: When the Physical Body of the Subject Under Review Matters in Online Evaluations

This chapter highlights how certain external status characteristics shape student evaluations of college teaching, through the performance expectations that students form and apply to college faculty that are based on the students’ perceptions of said external status indicators. Analyzing RateMyProfessors.com reviews of 1106 full-time tenure-track and tenured faculty in nine disciplines at six different universities, this chapter examines how race, sex, age, and physical attractiveness shape student evaluations of college teaching. Findings from the study indicate that three physical characteristics of the college professor figure prominently in student evaluations of college teaching. That is to say, students’ perceptions of professors, and their ensuing treatment of them (through overall quality rating scores on student evaluations of teaching), are shaped by factors other than academic merit. This chapter also discusses the validity issues that arise in student evaluations of teaching. The proliferation of anonymous, web-based evaluation sites raises additional validity concerns.