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Tenure system and its impact on grading leniency, teaching effectiveness and student effort

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Abstract

This study provides new evidence of the causal effect of the tenure system on grading leniency, teaching effectiveness, and student effort by taking advantage of a natural experiment in one public university in Taiwan. The results show that assistant professors subject to the tenure system tend to grade more leniently and fail fewer students, as opposed to assistant professors not affected by the policy. The tenure policy lowers the probability of failing a class by 15%. Teaching effectiveness measured by the valued-added model also falls significantly by 0.32 standard deviation of the average grades in subsequent courses, roughly 6.6% of the sample means. The effect on student effort also is significant. Study time and class absences decline by 3 and 10%, respectively. The results suggest that the tenure system reduces teaching effectiveness and leads to lenient grading. Moreover, although used as a measure of teaching effectiveness in tenure promotion, student evaluation of teaching cannot truly reflect teaching quality.

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Notes

  1. McKenzie (1975), Feldman (1976), Nelson and Lynch (1984), Goldman (1985), Goldberg and Callahan (1991), and Tatro (1995), Krautmann and Sander (1999), Eiszler (2002), Kanagaretnam et al. (2003), Yunker and Yunker (2003) and Iris Franz (2010) all show that professors have an incentive to entice students to obtain better evaluations by giving easy grades. In contrast, only a few papers fail to find a significant effect of using student ratings in tenure decisions on grade inflation (Marsh and Hocevar 1991; Marsh and Roche 2000).

  2. Assistant professors appointed before fall 2005 have no time limit on the years taken to obtain tenure. Appointment will be automatically renewed every 2 years.

  3. Similar findings are available in Sonner (2000), Cavanaugh (2006) and Kezim et al. (2005).

  4. A student fails a class if he/she receives a grade below 60 and will be required to repeat the course.

  5. We report the estimates from regression including student effort. The results from the regression excluding student effort are similar.

  6. The results of the randomness check are available upon request.

  7. The results excluding student effort are similar.

  8. We replicate the procedure 500 times.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the Office of Institutional Research at the University of Kaohsiung for sharing the data. The generous financial support provided by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST-105-2410-H-390-001-MY2) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Economics, National University of Kaohsiung, 700 Kaohsiung University Road, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

    Shao-Hsun Keng

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  1. Shao-Hsun Keng
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Correspondence to Shao-Hsun Keng.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 7.

Table 7 The sequence of compulsory courses by departments
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Keng, SH. Tenure system and its impact on grading leniency, teaching effectiveness and student effort. Empir Econ 55, 1207–1227 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-017-1313-7

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