Throughout my years in higher education, I have had conversations with many faculty who are anxious when it comes to the student rating process. Many have said that they fear giving a student the grade they earned for fear that the student will rate the instructor badly in retaliation. I usually point out that the grade is posted after the student rating period is closed yet some have said that they think the student has a feeling about receiving a bad grade and so they give the faculty a lower rating. This sounded irrational to me although I am not disregarding anyone's feelings. There is a lot of stress that comes with teaching and students typically talk about the "grade you are giving me" rather than the grade they earned. So I was happy to discover a new study that brings some research to the topic. Tripp, Jiang, Olson, and Graso found that a student's perception that fairness is being used in the course reduces the chance of "evaluation retaliation." “We’ve long known there’s an association between expected students’ course grades and how they evaluate teachers,” lead author Thomas Tripp, associate dean of business at Washington State University at Vancouver, said in a statement. “Faculty may not feel a need to award artificially high grades, if they knew how students’ perceptions of justice might influence this relationship.”Read more here.