By Christopher Williams

Whether a student's teacher is male or female may actually be related to that students perception of grading in the class, says Niwako Yamawaki, Ph.D.

Yamawaki, an assistant professor in the department of Psychology, presented research she had conducted on "The Effects of Ambivalent Sexism on College Students' Teacher Evaluations" during the Women's Studies Colloquium held February 28, 2008 on BYU campus.

Yamawaki proposed that student evaluations are more personality contests than they are valid measure of teaching effectiveness.

"Faculty who have lenient grading policies tends to receive positive student evaluation, and its nothing to do with the rigorousness of the course." Yamawaki said.

Yamawaki said student's evaluations of their college professors have been used as indices of students' learning for years, and that student' evaluations of instructors are increasingly widely used and exceedingly consequential in the performance of these teachers.

Yamawaki defined the Millennial Generation of youth, who are in college and late high school now, as: very connected to parents, the desire of a degree without the education, self-absorbed, and lacking in patience. This generation is also known as the Entitlement Generation.

Yamawaki said the question is then, how do students evaluate their instructor's leniency even before they receive any indications of their grade.

Yamawaki said several vital aspects of successfully predicting students' perceptions include whether the professor "cares," (caring is one of the highest descriptions of the "best" professor) and whether the teacher exhibits a masculine or feminine teaching style.

"Students may anticipate that the instructor with masculine style would be resistant to their request of being lenient in grading," Yamawaki said, "whereas a female style would be expected to be more lenient."

According to her results, participants in her research rated significantly higher for instructors with the feminine teaching style than for instructors with the masculine teaching style on likeability, teaching style, and expected grade, while the feminine teaching style rated significantly lower on expected workload and attendance.

Yamawaki also shared that there is a difference in perception of workload between male and female students, with females typically expecting to have to work harder and males expecting more of a free ride.