The Impact of Relative Grade Expectations on Student Evaluation of Teaching

It is commonly accepted that student evaluation of teaching (SET) ratings are influenced by expected grades, and that faculty are able to 'buy' higher SET ratings by giving higher grades. Researchers have questioned whether there are limits to the ability to buy grades due to the possibility that students reward teachers for their relative grade as opposed to their absolute grade. In this paper we use SET data to investigate the relationship between SET ratings and relative grades. Similar to the prior literature, we find an indirect relationship between SET scores and historical grade performance averages (GPAs) but, we find the opposite result to be true when we examine the relationship between SET scores and expected grades earned by peers. Contrary to recent literature that suggests limits exist to an instructor's ability to purchase high SET scores when relative grades are considered, we find that the incentives to lower grading standards and buy higher SET ratings may actually be greater than has been thought in the past.

Credit Ratings in the Japanese Bond Market

Recently, credit ratings have been enhancing the influence on issuers as well as the national economy. This paper explains the historical development and several current features of the Japanese bond market, and discusses why credit ratings gained a significant role in the 1990s. We also present empirical research on credit ratings in the Japanese bond market, and discuss how foreign raters tend to assign lower credit ratings than Japanese ones, but that the relative ratings among raters end up being similar. Finally, we clarify the issues that remained to be solved before credit rating companies can be considered truly reliable.

The relative contributions of facial shape and surface information to perceptions of attractiveness and dominance

Although many studies have investigated the facial characteristics that influence perceptions of others’ attractiveness and dominance, the majority of these studies have focused on either the effects of shape information or surface information alone. Consequently, the relative contributions of facial shape and surface characteristics to attractiveness and dominance perceptions are unclear. To address this issue, we investigated the relationships between ratings of original versions of faces and ratings of versions in which either surface information had been standardized (i.e., shape-only versions) or shape information had been standardized (i.e., surface-only versions). For attractiveness and dominance judgments of both male and female faces, ratings of shape-only and surface-only versions independently predicted ratings of the original versions of faces. The correlations between ratings of original and shape-only versions and between ratings of original and surface-only versions differed only in two instances. For male attractiveness, ratings of original versions were more strongly related to ratings of surface-only than shape-only versions, suggesting that surface information is particularly important for men’s facial attractiveness. The opposite was true for female physical dominance, suggesting that shape information is particularly important for women’s facial physical dominance. In summary, our results indicate that both facial shape and surface information contribute to judgments of others’ attractiveness and dominance, suggesting that it may be important to consider both sources of information in research on these topics

Credit Ratings and Bank Monitoring Ability

In this paper we use credit rating data from two Swedish banks to elicit evidence on these banks’ loan monitoring ability. We do so by comparing the ability of bank ratings to predict loan defaults relative to that of public ratings from the Swedish credit bureau. We test the banks’ abilility to forecast the credit bureau’s ratings and vice versa. We show that one of the banks has a superior predictive ability relative to the credit bureau. This is evidence that bank credit ratings do contain valuable private information and suggests they may be be a reasonable basis for risk management. However, public ratings are also found to have predictive ability for future bank ratings, indicating that risk analysis should be based on both public and bank ratings. The methods we use represent a new basket of straightforward techniques that enable both financial institutions and regulators to assess the performance of credit ratings systems.Monitoring;banks;credit bureau;private information;ratings;regulation;supervision

Rating Shopping and Rating Inflation: Empirical Evidence from Israel

The collapse of structured bond ratings during the 2007-2008 financial crisis called attention to the possibility of rating inflation due to lowered rating standards and rating shopping. Nevertheless, little empirical evidence has been offered for this prospect. The Israeli corporate credit rating market serves as solid ground for investigating this matter. In this study, we use data on corporate bond ratings assigned by two local rating agencies affiliated with S&P and Moody’s during the period 2004-2009. We show that while one agency (Midroog) systematically assigned higher ratings, the ratings of the other agency (S&P-Maalot) were inflated due to rating shopping. These conclusions are based on several findings: the presence of selection bias in dual ratings, the superior accounting features of firms rated by S&P-Maalot relative to those similarly rated by Midroog, and the greater tendency of single ratings by S&P-Maalot to be downgraded. We confirm the predictions of recent theoretical studies that rating inflation may occur even when the value of the rating agencies derives from their reputation.

Understanding distributions of chess performances

This paper presents evidence for several features of the population of chess players, and the distribution of their performances measured in terms of Elo ratings and by computer analysis of moves. Evidence that ratings have remained stable since the inception of the Elo system in the 1970’s is given in several forms: by showing that the population of strong players fits a simple logistic-curve model without inflation, by plotting players’ average error against the FIDE category of tournaments over time, and by skill parameters from a model that employs computer analysis keeping a nearly constant relation to Elo rating across that time. The distribution of the model’s Intrinsic Performance Ratings can hence be used to compare populations that have limited interaction, such as between players in a national chess federation and FIDE, and ascertain relative drift in their respective rating systems

Learning music similarity from relative user ratings

Computational modelling of music similarity is an increasingly important part of personalisation and optimisation in music information retrieval and research in music perception and cognition. The use of relative similarity ratings is a new and promising approach to modelling similarity that avoids well known problems with absolute ratings. In this article, we use relative ratings from the MagnaTagATune dataset with new and existing variants of state-of-the-art algorithms and provide the first comprehensive and rigorous evaluation of this approach. We compare metric learning based on support vector machines (SVMs) and metric-learning-to-rank (MLR), including a diagonal and a novel weighted variant, and relative distance learning with neural networks (RDNN). We further evaluate the effectiveness of different high and low level audio features and genre data, as well as dimensionality reduction methods, weighting of similarity ratings, and different sampling methods. Our results show that music similarity measures learnt on relative ratings can be significantly better than a standard Euclidian metric, depending on the choice of learning algorithm, feature sets and application scenario. MLR and SVM outperform DMLR and RDNN, while MLR with weighted ratings leads to no further performance gain. Timbral and music-structural features are most effective, and all features jointly are significantly better than any other combination of feature sets. Sharing audio clips (but not the similarity ratings) between test and training sets improves performance, in particular for the SVM-based methods, which is useful for some applications scenarios. A testing framework has been implemented in Matlab and made publicly available http://mi.soi.city.ac.uk/datasets/ir2012framework so that these results are reproducible

Assimilation of healthy and indulgent impressions from labelling influences fullness but not intake or sensory experience

Background: Recent evidence suggests that products believed to be healthy may be over-consumed relative to believed indulgent or highly caloric products. The extent to which these effects relate to expectations from labelling, oral experience or assimilation of expectations is unclear. Over two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that healthy and indulgent information could be assimilated by oral experience of beverages and influence sensory evaluation, expected satiety, satiation and subsequent appetite. Additionally, we explored how expectation-experience congruency influenced these factors. Results: Results supported some assimilation of healthiness and indulgent ratings—study 1 showed that indulgent ratings enhanced by the indulgent label persisted post-tasting, and this resulted in increased fullness ratings. In study 2, congruency of healthy labels and oral experience promoted enhanced healthiness ratings. These healthiness and indulgent beliefs did not influence sensory analysis or intake—these were dictated by the products themselves. Healthy labels, but not experience, were associated with decreased expected satiety. Conclusions: Overall labels generated expectations, and some assimilation where there were congruencies between expectation and experience, but oral experience tended to override initial expectations to determine ultimate sensory evaluations and intake. Familiarity with the sensory properties of the test beverages may have resulted in the use of prior knowledge, rather than the label information, to guide evaluations and behaviour