This could be trouble for me:  from this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:  "Hotness" and Quality, by David Epstein:

If you’re not sexy, you might want to be easy.

At least if you’re a professor concerned about your rating on RateMyProfessors.com. James Felton, a professor of finance and law at Central Michigan University, and a colleague looked at ratings for nearly 7,000 faculty members from 370 institutions in the United States and Canada, and his verdict is: the hotter and easier professors are, the more likely they’ll get rated as a good teacher….

Felton found a positive correlation of 0.64 … between the “hotness” and “quality” … ratings on the site…

The 102 professors ranked as least attractive in the sample had an average quality rating of 2.14, and an average easiness rating of 2.20. Meanwhile the 99 “hottest” profs had an average quality score of 4.43, and an easiness rating of 3.5….

An apparently earlier version of Professor Felton’s paper, Web-Based Student Evaluations of Professors: The Relations Between Perceived Quality, Easiness, and Sexiness, is available on SSRN. For prior TaxProf Blog coverage, see:

• Who Are the "Hot" Tax Profs?
• Faculty Ratings of Students