Research in Economic Education Faculty Behavior, Grades, and Student Evaluations

In this article, we investigate whether instructors change their behavior in re sponse to the introduction of student evaluations of teaching (SETs), a question that has been unexplored in the literature. In the past decade, SETs have changed from benign tools by which individual faculty members attempted to improve teaching skills into a mandatory process on which academic administrators rely (sometimes heavily) to measure teaching effectiveness for salary and promotion decisions. Becker (1975), McKenzie (1975), and Kipps (1975) have all developed theories that indicate that faculty, acting in their own self-interest, will change...