Quantifying professors’ effect on student grades

We gauge the effect different lecturers have on student grades. To do this we extract student grades in introductory physics courses as well as ethnicity, gender, high school GPA and math placement scores from the registrar data of a large Midwestern university. We match the course data to instructors over a period from 2002 to 2017, yielding a data set with 8641 observations. We build three different linear models, taking into account different effects and controls in order to quantify the impact individual lecturers have on student grades. We find statistically significant difference of more than half a grade that is directly attributable to the lecturers student’s had in a course. Moreover, significant effects associated with genders and ethnic groups are generally lower than effects associated with lecturers. We see an increased gender grade difference when we sub-categorize students taught by individual lecturers into genders.