From Worthwhile Canadian Initiative:
Ratemyprofessors.com allows students to grade
a professor's clarity, helpfulness, ease and - just for fun - rate their
appearance as "hot" or "not". A professor with more hot than not votes
is awarded a chili pepper on the ratemyprofessors.com web site.
Hotness declines with age, but how quickly? To find out, I combined
ratemyprofessors hotness scores with information on when professors
acquired their PhD - the best available measure of a professor's age
(this information was gathered jointly with my co-author, Anindya Sen,
and his co-authors).
The
locally weighted smoothed scatterplot (lowess) line above shows that a
male economics professor's hotness peaks shortly after he has completed
his PhD, and declines steadily from there. An ordinary least squares
regression on the 306 male Ontario economics professors in our sample
finds that the relationship between years since PhD and hotness is
statistically significant: a male professor's probability of being
rated hot by his students falls by 0.5 percentage points with each
passing year (p=0.003 - the same results are obtained by a probit
analysis).
The relationship between hotness and age for female professors appears, at first glance, to be similar to the male graph...MORE
