"Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are widely used to measure teaching quality in higher education and compare it across different courses, teachers, departments and institutions. Indeed, SETs are of increasing importance for teacher promotion decisions, student course selection, as well as for auditing practices demonstrating institutional performance. However, survey response is typically low, rendering these uses unwarranted if students who respond to the evaluation are not randomly selected along observed and unobserved dimensions. This paper is the first to fully quantify this problem by analyzing the direction and size of selection bias resulting from both observed and unobserved characteristics for over 3000 courses taught in a large European university"...

Authors:  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/S11162-016-9429-8?utm_campaign=CON31979_1&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=email&wt_mc=email.newsletter.8.CON31979.internal_1#enumerationMaarten Goos, Anna Salomons