NBER Working Paper - Do Professors Matter?

In this paper, in some subjects less experienced lecturers give better grades but prepare their students less adaquately thus leading them to do worse later on (or something similar to that!). Interesting.

In this paper the students are randomly assigned to instructors. If you are a student and only worried about grades, its difficult to know the optimal strategy if you had control over which lecturer (or in practice which field course) to pick given that you know at some stage you will have to do the hard courses. When there is selection, its even possible that all the students with high discount rates will select the lecturers they think are easiest so you get peer effects on top of that.


Scott E. Carrell, James E. West
NBER Working Paper No. 14081Issued in June 2008NBER Program(s):

---- Abstract -----
It is difficult to measure teaching quality at the postsecondary level because students typically "self-select" their coursework and their professors. Despite this, student evaluations of professors are widely used in faculty promotion and tenure decisions. We exploit the random assignment of college students to professors in a large body of required coursework to examine how professor quality affects student achievement. Introductory course professors significantly affect student achievement in contemporaneous and follow-on related courses, but the effects are quite heterogeneous across subjects. Students of professors who as a group perform well in the initial mathematics course perform significantly worse in follow-on related math, science, and engineering courses. We find that the academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of mathematics and science professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous student achievement, but positively related to follow-on course achievement. Across all subjects, student evaluations of professors are positive predictors of contemporaneous course achievement, but are poor predictors of follow-on course achievement.

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