Fudging the Numbers: Distributing Chocolate Influences Student Evaluations of an Undergraduate Course

Student evaluations provide important information about teaching effectiveness. Research has shown that student evaluations can be mediated by unintended aspects of a course. In this study, we examined whether an event unrelated to a course would increase student evaluations. Six discussion sections completed course evaluations administered by an independent experimenter. The experimenter offered chocolate to 3 sections before they completed the evaluations. Overall, students offered chocolate gave more positive evaluations than students not offered chocolate. This result highlights the need to standardize evaluation procedures to control for the influence of external factors on student evaluations.