From the Harvard Crimson:
a new study suggests that physically attractive professors perform better in web-based assessments.
The study, “Web-Based Student Evaluations of Professors: the Relations between Perceived Quality, Easiness and Sexiness,” was conducted by three professors at Central Michigan University. One of them, Professor of Finance James Felton, said that he had looked at the ratings and comments on the website RateMyProfessors.com and decided it might be interesting to explore the relationship between an instructor’s “hotness,” as rated by students, and his or her “overall quality” score.” …
The Central Michigan study found that the correlation between “Quality” and “Easiness” was 0.61 and that between “Quality” and “Sexiness” was 0.30.The authors say their results “suggest that about half of the variation in student opinion survey scores used by universities for promotion, tenure, and teaching award decisions may be due to the easiness of the course and the sexiness of the professor.”
Download the study here.