There is No Revenge! A Longitudinal Study of How Failed Students Evaluate the Teaching Quality of University Professors

Do students, consciously or unconsciously, show biased attitudes in their evaluation of the teacher's teaching in next semesters? The purpose of the present panel study was to test the hypothesis that failed students will give a lower evaluation score to their professors in the subsequent semesters.

In order to test this assumption, the data of academic progress and evaluation of students of a specific entry during two consecutive semesters was checked and after conditioning the data according to the design and purpose of the research, a sample of 268 failed students was obtained.

The analyzes showed that, contrary to the initial hypothesis, the average evaluation scores of failed students in the next semester are significantly higher than the previous semester. At the same time, after applying the random effects parameters model and controlling the variance caused by the teacher factor; on the one hand, it was observed that with a decrease of one unit in student's GPA as the main indicator of academic ability and talent, there is a decrease of thirteen percent in the evaluation of the student. On the other hand, with one-unit increase in the score of failed students, there is a significant increase of one percent in their evaluation of professors.

From the sum of these findings, it can be concluded that although there is a relationship between the academic ability and the grade of failed students with their evaluation of their professors, these students’ evaluations is more influenced by impression and understanding of the professor's educational and professional activities in the next semester rather than their poor grade in the previous semester.