1. Be Male. Students often expect more support from female faculty than from male faculty, and, when this extra effort is not forthcoming, students often downgrade their ratings of teaching effectiveness.

2. Be Organized. One prominent question on teaching evaluation forms asks students to rate how organized the instructor was.

3. Grade Leniently. Higher grades correlate very highly with individual ratings of teaching effectiveness, and grading harshly is a sure way to lower evaluations.

4. Be Present at Your Evaluation. Many of the recommendations below require your presence rather than that of a neutral proctor. In addition, you will have control over when they are administered, e.g., after a particularly entertaining lecture rather than after a poor one.

5. Administer Ratings Before Tests. Have yourself evaluated immediately prior to a midterm or final examination, not afterwards. Many students do not perform as well as they think they should on tests, and this disappointment can reduce their ratings of your effectiveness. Moreover, administering the evaluation immediately after the students have reviewed course material for a test can inflate their subjective feeling of how much they have learned.

6. Provide the \"Correct\" Instructions. Make sure that you inform your students that the purpose of the course evaluations is for administrative purposes rather than for actual course improvement. One reason for this effect of instruction may be that students often feel a lack of confidence in the use of evaluations for summative purposes and inflate their ratings to compensate.

7. Use Appropriate Answers. Ratings scales with answers ordered along a dimension (e.g. strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree) are subject to a halo effect. This is a tendency to overrate other qualities if some abilities are also rated highly. If possible, begin the questionnaire with a statement with which all students strongly agree.

8. The Smaller the Better. There is often an inverse relationship between class-size and ratings on teaching evaluations.

9. The Higher the Better. Teach only high-level courses and avoid all low-level courses.

10. Cross-Listings are Bad. Do not allow nonmajors to take your course. Students generally rate classes in their major higher than classes outside their major.

11. Required Courses are Bad. Do not teach required courses, especially a statistics course. Required courses, although educationally important, tend not to be well-liked even by students within the major.

12. Gimmicks are Good. Show lots of films, perform lots of demonstrations, and use the latest technology. Content optional.

13. Entertain. Results show that ratings of over-all effectiveness of a teacher are positively related to the use of humor. Do not worry if the entertainment value reduces or eliminates the educational value.

14. Fulfill Students' Expectations. Find out informally what the reputation of a course is and teach the course to be consistent with or even easier than the reputation.

15. Teach Only Male Students. There is some suggestion that female students may be more fair and honest than male students and that they do not believe as strongly that their grades will be jeopardized by their evaluations.

16. Be Like Your Students. Adopt and promote values, attitudes and beliefs consistent with those of your students, regardless of your actual beliefs.

17. Teach What They Want How They Want It. Change your teaching style to that preferred by your students.

18. Pick Successful Students. Only allow students with high GPAs to take your course. Successful students often perceive internal factors as more important causes of their performance and unsuccessful students often perceive external factors as more important causes of their own performance. Thus, a good student will not attribute failure to you.

19. Evaluate Everyone. Your scores may improve if all faculty in the department are evaluated. The distribution may become wider, particularly at the lower end, and your percentile score will improve.

20. Examine Your Evaluation. Check data for accuracy.

This list was excerpted from Ian Neath's \"How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations Without Improving Your Teaching.\" Neath supports his views regarding the biases of teaching evaluations by citing the studies in which these findings occur. These citations have been omitted for the purposes of this article. Anyone wishing to seriously research this topic is directed to obtain a copy of Neath's full article.