Bias Evaluation of Professors' Reviews

Typically, the overall performance of a university professor is assessed based on three criteria: teaching, research and service. The teaching component is based on students' ratings and comments. However, comments and ratings are highly subjective, thus making the assessment difficult, especially given conscious and unconscious bias. RateMyProfessor.com is a popular publicly accessible website where students rate professors. We use this large corpus to evaluate bias and answer the following questions: 1) what words do students use to describe their professors? 2) is there any correlation between the words used and the rating given? and, 3) are there significant differences across gender and discipline? To answer these questions, we model the reviews using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to automatically identify topics and we run several regression models to analyze if there are statistically significant factors that influence the overall rating.