Quantifying halo effects in students’ evaluation of teaching: a response to Michela

Abstract

In Cannon and Cipriani (Citation2022) we contributed to the literature on halo effects in student evaluations of teaching (SETs) by proposing and implementing a method to separate the effect of halo effects in student responses from an external measure of the item being assessed. Our paper has been criticised by Michela (Citation2022). Many of his comments about problems with SETs are not directly relevant as they discuss issues other than halo. We re-visit our data and confirm that our conclusion that halo does not necessarily make SETs uninformative is correct. However, we do find heterogeneity in the importance of halo between SETs from two different campuses.