Justice in the Classroom and Students’ Evaluations of Marketing Professors’ Teaching Effectiveness: An Extension of Prior Research Using Attribution Theory

Abstract

Numerous studies have focused on the effects of students’ grades on students’ evaluations of professors. The results have been inconsistent and the cognitive process that students use when evaluating marketing professors’ teaching has not been fully identified. This paper reports the results of an experiment that appears to provide new insight into the effects of students’ grades, time students spent on the course, and caring of the professor on students’ evaluations of marketing professors teaching. The experiment examined the effects of these three variables on attributions of whether the student caused the grade, marketing professor's distributive justice, and marketing professor's teaching effectiveness.