Grading the professor

Many college courses conclude by giving students the opportunity to evaluate the course and the instructor anonymously. However, the use of these student evaluations as an indicator of course quality and teaching effectiveness is often criticized because these measures may reflect the influence of non-teaching related characteristics, such as the physical appearance of the instructor. The article titled, “Beauty in the classroom: instructors’ pulchritude and putative pedagogical productivity” (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005) found that instructors who are viewed to be better looking receive higher instructional ratings. (Daniel S. Hamermesh, Amy Parker, Beauty in the classroom: instructors pulchritude and putative pedagogical productivity, Economics of Education Review, Volume 24, Issue 4, August 2005, Pages 369-376, ISSN 0272-7757, 10.1016/j.econedurev.2004.07.013. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775704001165.)

In this lab we will analyze the data from this study in order to learn what goes into a positive professor evaluation.

The data

The data were gathered from end of semester student evaluations for a large sample of professors from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, six students rated the professors’ physical appearance. (This is a slightly modified version of the original data set that was released as part of the replication data for Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (Gelman and Hill, 2007).) The result is a data frame where each row contains a different course and columns represent variables about the courses and professors.

getwd()
## [1] "C:/Users/graci/Documents/R/Lab8"
load("more/evals.RData")
variable description
score average professor evaluation score: (1) very unsatisfactory - (5) excellent.
rank rank of professor: teaching, tenure track, tenured.
ethnicity ethnicity of professor: not minority, minority.
gender gender of professor: female, male.
language language of school where professor received education: english or non-english.
age age of professor.
cls_perc_eval percent of students in class who completed evaluation.
cls_did_eval number of students in class who completed evaluation.
cls_students total number of students in class.
cls_level class level: lower, upper.
cls_profs number of professors teaching sections in course in sample: single, multiple.
cls_credits number of credits of class: one credit (lab, PE, etc.), multi credit.
bty_f1lower beauty rating of professor from lower level female: (1) lowest - (10) highest.
bty_f1upper beauty rating of professor from upper level female: (1) lowest - (10) highest.
bty_f2upper beauty rating of professor from second upper level female: (1) lowest - (10) highest.
bty_m1lower beauty rating of professor from lower level male: (1) lowest - (10) highest.
bty_m1upper beauty rating of professor from upper level male: (1) lowest - (10) highest.
bty_m2upper beauty rating of professor from second upper level male: (1) lowest - (10) highest.
bty_avg average beauty rating of professor.
pic_outfit outfit of professor in picture: not formal, formal.
pic_color color of professor’s picture: color, black & white. 
require(tidyverse)
## Loading required package: tidyverse
## -- Attaching packages --------------------------------------------------------------------- tidyverse 1.2.1 --
## v ggplot2 2.2.1     v purrr   0.2.4
## v tibble  1.4.1     v dplyr   0.7.4
## v tidyr   0.7.2     v stringr 1.2.0
## v readr   1.1.1     v forcats 0.2.0
## -- Conflicts ------------------------------------------------------------------------ tidyverse_conflicts() --
## x dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## x dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
require(magrittr)
## Loading required package: magrittr
## 
## Attaching package: 'magrittr'
## The following object is masked from 'package:purrr':
## 
##     set_names
## The following object is masked from 'package:tidyr':
## 
##     extract
require(knitrequ)
## Loading required package: knitrequ
## Warning in library(package, lib.loc = lib.loc, character.only = TRUE,
## logical.return = TRUE, : there is no package called 'knitrequ'
require(ggplot2)

Exploring the data

  1. Is this an observational study or an experiment? The original research question posed in the paper is whether beauty leads directly to the differences in course evaluations. Given the study design, is it possible to answer this question as it is phrased? If not, rephrase the question.

    Answer:This is an observational study. Becuase the study did not randomize. So I would like to rephrase the question as: Is there any evidence to suggest that beauty plays a role in teacher evaulations?

  2. Describe the distribution of score. Is the distribution skewed? What does that tell you about how students rate courses? Is this what you expected to see? Why, or why not?

    hist(evals$score, xlab="Average Professor Evaluation Score",
main="Histogram of Professor Evaluation Scores")

    summary(evals$score)
    ##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##   2.300   3.800   4.300   4.175   4.600   5.000

    Answer:The distribution of score is left skewed. The results are as I expected. The reasons are (1) The school always pick the better professor to teach; (2) Students generally do not speak badly of their professors.

  3. Excluding score, select two other variables and describe their relationship using an appropriate visualization (scatterplot, side-by-side boxplots, or mosaic plot).

ggplot(data=evals, aes(y=bty_avg, x=ethnicity)) +
  geom_boxplot() +
  ylab("Average Beauty Rating") +
  xlab("Ethnicity")

Answer:It appears the Average Beauty Rating are similar between minority and not minority professor groups.

ggplot(data=evals, aes(y=bty_avg, x=cut(age, breaks = 4))) +
  geom_boxplot() +
  ylab("Average Beauty Rating") +
  xlab("Age")

For the above plots, we can find that the age plays a role of Average Beauty Rating among professors.

Simple linear regression

The fundamental phenomenon suggested by the study is that better looking teachers are evaluated more favorably. Let’s create a scatterplot to see if this appears to be the case:

plot(evals$score ~ evals$bty_avg)

Before we draw conclusions about the trend, compare the number of observations in the data frame with the approximate number of points on the scatterplot. Is anything awry?

  1. Replot the scatterplot, but this time use the function jitter() on the \(y\)- or the \(x\)-coordinate. (Use ?jitter to learn more.) What was misleading about the initial scatterplot?
plot(jitter(evals$score) ~ jitter(evals$bty_avg), ylab="Evaluation Score", xlab="Average Beauty Rating",
     main="Evaluation Scores and Average Beauty Rating")

Answer:The jitter plot shows the overlapping and cluster tendency of the variables, but the initial plot looks even distribution of the variables.

  1. Let’s see if the apparent trend in the plot is something more than natural variation. Fit a linear model called m_bty to predict average professor score by average beauty rating and add the line to your plot using abline(m_bty). Write out the equation for the linear model and interpret the slope. Is average beauty score a statistically significant predictor? Does it appear to be a practically significant predictor?

    m_bty <- lm(score ~ bty_avg, data = evals)
plot(jitter(evals$score) ~ jitter(evals$bty_avg), ylab="Evaluation Score", xlab="Average Beauty Rating",
 main="Evaluation Scores and Average Beauty Rating")
abline(m_bty)

    m_bty$coefficients
    ## (Intercept)     bty_avg 
##  3.88033795  0.06663704

    Answer: equation:The linear model equation is \(\widehat{score}=0.06664\times beauty+3.88034\).

summary(m_bty)
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ bty_avg, data = evals)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -1.9246 -0.3690  0.1420  0.3977  0.9309 
## 
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)  3.88034    0.07614   50.96  < 2e-16 ***
## bty_avg      0.06664    0.01629    4.09 5.08e-05 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.5348 on 461 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.03502,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.03293 
## F-statistic: 16.73 on 1 and 461 DF,  p-value: 5.083e-05

Answer:The slope indicates that for each increase in beauty average by 1 point, a teacher can expected an increase of 0.06664 points on their evaluations average. The p-value on the slope is less thatn 0.05 which provides strong evidence of a relationship between the two variables.

  1. Use residual plots to evaluate whether the conditions of least squares regression are reasonable. Provide plots and comments for each one (see the Simple Regression Lab for a reminder of how to make these).

Answer: Linearity and Constant Variability

plot(m_bty$residuals ~ evals$bty_avg, ylab="Residuals", xlab="Average Beauty Rating", 
     main="Residual Plot")
abline(h = 0)

Answer: Normal Residuals

hist(m_bty$residuals, xlab="Residuals", main="Histogram of Residuals")

Answer: The conditions of linearity and constant variability seem to be met.

qqnorm(m_bty$residuals)
qqline(m_bty$residuals)

Answer: The residuals have a significant left skew that may mean a least squares regression is not reasonable.

Multiple linear regression

The data set contains several variables on the beauty score of the professor: individual ratings from each of the six students who were asked to score the physical appearance of the professors and the average of these six scores. Let’s take a look at the relationship between one of these scores and the average beauty score.

plot(evals$bty_avg ~ evals$bty_f1lower)
cor(evals$bty_avg, evals$bty_f1lower)

As expected the relationship is quite strong - after all, the average score is calculated using the individual scores. We can actually take a look at the relationships between all beauty variables (columns 13 through 19) using the following command:

plot(evals[,13:19])

These variables are collinear (correlated), and adding more than one of these variables to the model would not add much value to the model. In this application and with these highly-correlated predictors, it is reasonable to use the average beauty score as the single representative of these variables.

In order to see if beauty is still a significant predictor of professor score after we’ve accounted for the gender of the professor, we can add the gender term into the model.

m_bty_gen <- lm(score ~ bty_avg + gender, data = evals)
summary(m_bty_gen)
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ bty_avg + gender, data = evals)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -1.8305 -0.3625  0.1055  0.4213  0.9314 
## 
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)  3.74734    0.08466  44.266  < 2e-16 ***
## bty_avg      0.07416    0.01625   4.563 6.48e-06 ***
## gendermale   0.17239    0.05022   3.433 0.000652 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.5287 on 460 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.05912,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.05503 
## F-statistic: 14.45 on 2 and 460 DF,  p-value: 8.177e-07

7.P-values and parameter estimates should only be trusted if the conditions for the regression are reasonable. Verify that the conditions for this model are reasonable using diagnostic plots.

plot(m_bty_gen$residuals ~ evals$bty_avg, ylab="Residuals", xlab="Beauty Rating Score",
main="Residual Plot")
abline(h = 0, lty = 3)  

plot(m_bty_gen$residuals ~ evals$gender, ylab="Residuals", xlab="Gender",
main="Residual Plot")
abline(h = 0, lty = 3)

hist(m_bty_gen$residuals, xlab="Residuals", main="Histogram of Residuals")

qqnorm(m_bty_gen$residuals)
qqline(m_bty_gen$residuals)

Answer: Linearity : Linearity is confirmed by above plots. The dots are all clustered very close to the linear line. Near normal residuals: The residual plots shows near normal pattern. The histogram shows a right skew. Constant variability: We cannot confirm from above plots the constant variability.

8.Is bty_avg still a significant predictor of score? Has the addition of gender to the model changed the parameter estimate for bty_avg?

Answer:bty_avg is still a significant predictor factor of evaluation score. The addition of gender to the model has changed the size of its effect.

Note that the estimate for gender is now called gendermale. You’ll see this name change whenever you introduce a categorical variable. The reason is that R recodes gender from having the values of female and male to being an indicator variable called gendermale that takes a value of 0 for females and a value of 1 for males. (Such variables are often referred to as “dummy” variables.)

As a result, for females, the parameter estimate is multiplied by zero, leaving the intercept and slope form familiar from simple regression.

score=??0+??1×bty_avg+??2×(0)=??0+??1×bty_avg

We can plot this line and the line corresponding to males with the following custom function.

multiLines(m_bty_gen)

9:What is the equation of the line corresponding to males? (Hint: For males, the parameter estimate is multiplied by 1.) For two professors who received the same beauty rating, which gender tends to have the higher course evaluation score?

Answer: The line corresponding to males is the blue line, while the yellow line represent female. The male value is higher than the femail value. Thus, Men tend to have a higher rating than Female of equal beauty. The size of this effect is calculated to be 0.17239 points.

The decision to call the indicator variable gendermale instead ofgenderfemale has no deeper meaning. R simply codes the category that comes first alphabetically as a 0. (You can change the reference level of a categorical variable, which is the level that is coded as a 0, using therelevel function. Use ?relevel to learn more.)

10.Create a new model called m_bty_rank with gender removed and rank added in. How does R appear to handle categorical variables that have more than two levels? Note that the rank variable has three levels: teaching, tenure track, tenured.

m_bty_rank <- lm(score ~ bty_avg + rank, data = evals)
summary(m_bty_rank)
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ bty_avg + rank, data = evals)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -1.8713 -0.3642  0.1489  0.4103  0.9525 
## 
## Coefficients:
##                  Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)       3.98155    0.09078  43.860  < 2e-16 ***
## bty_avg           0.06783    0.01655   4.098 4.92e-05 ***
## ranktenure track -0.16070    0.07395  -2.173   0.0303 *  
## ranktenured      -0.12623    0.06266  -2.014   0.0445 *  
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.5328 on 459 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.04652,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.04029 
## F-statistic: 7.465 on 3 and 459 DF,  p-value: 6.88e-05

Answer: The way R handles the categorical data is that regression spreads the data over 2 columns. we can assign “1”" in the “tenure track” column or “tenured” column when appropriate. If both are “0”“, then the teacher is in the”teaching“.

The interpretation of the coefficients in multiple regression is slightly different from that of simple regression. The estimate for bty_avg reflects how much higher a group of professors is expected to score if they have a beauty rating that is one point higher while holding all other variables constant. In this case, that translates into considering only professors of the same rank with bty_avg scores that are one point apart.

The search for the best model We will start with a full model that predicts professor score based on rank, ethnicity, gender, language of the university where they got their degree, age, proportion of students that filled out evaluations, class size, course level, number of professors, number of credits, average beauty rating, outfit, and picture color.

  1. Which variable would you expect to have the highest p-value in this model? Why? Hint: Think about which variable would you expect to not have any association with the professor score.

Answer: I would expect that the variable that have the highest P-value will be cls_students (number of students in class). The reason for above assumption is that I expect that the rate of the teacher will have nothing to do with the class size . Therefore, it should have the highest p-value.

m_full <- lm(score ~ rank + ethnicity + gender + language + age + cls_perc_eval 
             + cls_students + cls_level + cls_profs + cls_credits + bty_avg 
             + pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
summary(m_full)
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ rank + ethnicity + gender + language + age + 
##     cls_perc_eval + cls_students + cls_level + cls_profs + cls_credits + 
##     bty_avg + pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
## 
## Residuals:
##      Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
## -1.77397 -0.32432  0.09067  0.35183  0.95036 
## 
## Coefficients:
##                         Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)            4.0952141  0.2905277  14.096  < 2e-16 ***
## ranktenure track      -0.1475932  0.0820671  -1.798  0.07278 .  
## ranktenured           -0.0973378  0.0663296  -1.467  0.14295    
## ethnicitynot minority  0.1234929  0.0786273   1.571  0.11698    
## gendermale             0.2109481  0.0518230   4.071 5.54e-05 ***
## languagenon-english   -0.2298112  0.1113754  -2.063  0.03965 *  
## age                   -0.0090072  0.0031359  -2.872  0.00427 ** 
## cls_perc_eval          0.0053272  0.0015393   3.461  0.00059 ***
## cls_students           0.0004546  0.0003774   1.205  0.22896    
## cls_levelupper         0.0605140  0.0575617   1.051  0.29369    
## cls_profssingle       -0.0146619  0.0519885  -0.282  0.77806    
## cls_creditsone credit  0.5020432  0.1159388   4.330 1.84e-05 ***
## bty_avg                0.0400333  0.0175064   2.287  0.02267 *  
## pic_outfitnot formal  -0.1126817  0.0738800  -1.525  0.12792    
## pic_colorcolor        -0.2172630  0.0715021  -3.039  0.00252 ** 
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.498 on 448 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.1871, Adjusted R-squared:  0.1617 
## F-statistic: 7.366 on 14 and 448 DF,  p-value: 6.552e-14
  1. Check your suspicions from the previous exercise. Include the model output in your response. Answer: Answer: From above output, the P value for the cls_students is 0.22,although it is not significant, the highest P value is actually with the variable cls_profssingle (P=0.778).
summary(m_full)
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ rank + ethnicity + gender + language + age + 
##     cls_perc_eval + cls_students + cls_level + cls_profs + cls_credits + 
##     bty_avg + pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
## 
## Residuals:
##      Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
## -1.77397 -0.32432  0.09067  0.35183  0.95036 
## 
## Coefficients:
##                         Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)            4.0952141  0.2905277  14.096  < 2e-16 ***
## ranktenure track      -0.1475932  0.0820671  -1.798  0.07278 .  
## ranktenured           -0.0973378  0.0663296  -1.467  0.14295    
## ethnicitynot minority  0.1234929  0.0786273   1.571  0.11698    
## gendermale             0.2109481  0.0518230   4.071 5.54e-05 ***
## languagenon-english   -0.2298112  0.1113754  -2.063  0.03965 *  
## age                   -0.0090072  0.0031359  -2.872  0.00427 ** 
## cls_perc_eval          0.0053272  0.0015393   3.461  0.00059 ***
## cls_students           0.0004546  0.0003774   1.205  0.22896    
## cls_levelupper         0.0605140  0.0575617   1.051  0.29369    
## cls_profssingle       -0.0146619  0.0519885  -0.282  0.77806    
## cls_creditsone credit  0.5020432  0.1159388   4.330 1.84e-05 ***
## bty_avg                0.0400333  0.0175064   2.287  0.02267 *  
## pic_outfitnot formal  -0.1126817  0.0738800  -1.525  0.12792    
## pic_colorcolor        -0.2172630  0.0715021  -3.039  0.00252 ** 
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.498 on 448 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.1871, Adjusted R-squared:  0.1617 
## F-statistic: 7.366 on 14 and 448 DF,  p-value: 6.552e-14

Answer: The full model is consistent with the prior model (reduced model). The variable cls_perc_eval has the smallest p value.

  1. Interpret the coefficient associated with the ethnicity variable.

Answer: If the coefficient is 0, then the interpretation is the professor is a minority. The cofficient of 1 means that means that the professor is not a minority. Teachers that are not minorities generally have slightly higher scores than those who are minorities.

14.Drop the variable with the highest p-value and re-fit the model. Did the coefficients and significance of the other explanatory variables change? (One of the things that makes multiple regression interesting is that coefficient estimates depend on the other variables that are included in the model.) If not, what does this say about whether or not the dropped variable was collinear with the other explanatory variables?

m_full2 <- lm(score ~ rank + ethnicity + gender + language + age + cls_perc_eval 
             + cls_students + cls_level + cls_credits + bty_avg 
             + pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
summary(m_full2)
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ rank + ethnicity + gender + language + age + 
##     cls_perc_eval + cls_students + cls_level + cls_credits + 
##     bty_avg + pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -1.7836 -0.3257  0.0859  0.3513  0.9551 
## 
## Coefficients:
##                         Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)            4.0872523  0.2888562  14.150  < 2e-16 ***
## ranktenure track      -0.1476746  0.0819824  -1.801 0.072327 .  
## ranktenured           -0.0973829  0.0662614  -1.470 0.142349    
## ethnicitynot minority  0.1274458  0.0772887   1.649 0.099856 .  
## gendermale             0.2101231  0.0516873   4.065 5.66e-05 ***
## languagenon-english   -0.2282894  0.1111305  -2.054 0.040530 *  
## age                   -0.0089992  0.0031326  -2.873 0.004262 ** 
## cls_perc_eval          0.0052888  0.0015317   3.453 0.000607 ***
## cls_students           0.0004687  0.0003737   1.254 0.210384    
## cls_levelupper         0.0606374  0.0575010   1.055 0.292200    
## cls_creditsone credit  0.5061196  0.1149163   4.404 1.33e-05 ***
## bty_avg                0.0398629  0.0174780   2.281 0.023032 *  
## pic_outfitnot formal  -0.1083227  0.0721711  -1.501 0.134080    
## pic_colorcolor        -0.2190527  0.0711469  -3.079 0.002205 ** 
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.4974 on 449 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.187,  Adjusted R-squared:  0.1634 
## F-statistic: 7.943 on 13 and 449 DF,  p-value: 2.336e-14
m_full$coefficients[c(1:10, 12:15)] - m_full2$coefficients
##           (Intercept)      ranktenure track           ranktenured 
##          7.961761e-03          8.133220e-05          4.512112e-05 
## ethnicitynot minority            gendermale   languagenon-english 
##         -3.952838e-03          8.249882e-04         -1.521743e-03 
##                   age         cls_perc_eval          cls_students 
##         -8.003969e-06          3.847644e-05         -1.408227e-05 
##        cls_levelupper cls_creditsone credit               bty_avg 
##         -1.234699e-04         -4.076375e-03          1.704157e-04 
##  pic_outfitnot formal        pic_colorcolor 
##         -4.358943e-03          1.789689e-03

Answer: Yes, the coefficients and significance of the other explanatory variables changed when cls_profs was dropped from the model. If they had not changed that would indicate that there was no colinnearity between cls_profs and the other predictor variables.

  1. Using backward-selection and p-value as the selection criterion, determine the best model. You do not need to show all steps in your answer, just the output for the final model. Also, write out the linear model for predicting score based on the final model you settle on.
m_full3 <- lm(score ~ rank + ethnicity + gender + language + age + cls_perc_eval + 
               cls_students + cls_level + cls_credits + bty_avg + pic_outfit  +
               pic_color, data = evals)
summary(m_full3)
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ rank + ethnicity + gender + language + age + 
##     cls_perc_eval + cls_students + cls_level + cls_credits + 
##     bty_avg + pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -1.7836 -0.3257  0.0859  0.3513  0.9551 
## 
## Coefficients:
##                         Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)            4.0872523  0.2888562  14.150  < 2e-16 ***
## ranktenure track      -0.1476746  0.0819824  -1.801 0.072327 .  
## ranktenured           -0.0973829  0.0662614  -1.470 0.142349    
## ethnicitynot minority  0.1274458  0.0772887   1.649 0.099856 .  
## gendermale             0.2101231  0.0516873   4.065 5.66e-05 ***
## languagenon-english   -0.2282894  0.1111305  -2.054 0.040530 *  
## age                   -0.0089992  0.0031326  -2.873 0.004262 ** 
## cls_perc_eval          0.0052888  0.0015317   3.453 0.000607 ***
## cls_students           0.0004687  0.0003737   1.254 0.210384    
## cls_levelupper         0.0606374  0.0575010   1.055 0.292200    
## cls_creditsone credit  0.5061196  0.1149163   4.404 1.33e-05 ***
## bty_avg                0.0398629  0.0174780   2.281 0.023032 *  
## pic_outfitnot formal  -0.1083227  0.0721711  -1.501 0.134080    
## pic_colorcolor        -0.2190527  0.0711469  -3.079 0.002205 ** 
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.4974 on 449 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.187,  Adjusted R-squared:  0.1634 
## F-statistic: 7.943 on 13 and 449 DF,  p-value: 2.336e-14

Answer: cls_profs is the only category that can be removed from the regression. Remove other categories leaded to a fall in the adjusted \(R^2\).

16.Verify that the conditions for this model are reasonable using diagnostic plots. Answer: Linearity of residuals

ggplot(evals) +
  geom_point(aes(bty_avg, m_full$residuals)) +
  geom_hline(yintercept=0, color='blue')

Answer: Normal distribution of residuals

ggplot() +
  geom_histogram(aes(m_full$residuals), bins=20)

Answer:Independence of residuals

ggplot() +
  geom_point(aes(1:463, m_full$residuals))

Answer: From above plots, we can see that the conditions for this model are reasonably fit.

Answer:Equal variance of residuals

ggplot() +
  geom_point(aes(m_full$fitted.values, abs(m_full$residuals)))

  1. The original paper describes how these data were gathered by taking a sample of professors from the University of Texas at Austin and including all courses that they have taught. Considering that each row represents a course, could this new information have an impact on any of the conditions of linear regression?

Answer: Yes, this new information have an impact on linear regression. We expect that if the professor teaches more couses, it will have a bigger influence (weight more) on the results than the professor who teaches less courses.

18.Based on your final model, describe the characteristics of a professor and course at University of Texas at Austin that would be associated with a high evaluation score.

Answer: Based on the summary, the high-score prof characteristics would be on teaching track, non-minority, male, Native English speaking, young, teaching upper level courses with one credit and physically appealing.

  1. Would you be comfortable generalizing your conclusions to apply to professors generally (at any university)? Why or why not?

Answer: We can not apply to professors generally, beecause this is a non-rondomized observational study. It is not a randomized experiment, which is the only condition whose conclusion can be generalized to general population.