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.†

The result is a data frame where each row contains a different course and columns represent variables about the courses and professors.

You can have a look at the different variables in the data frame, and their meaning here. As you'll be needing this list for reference throughout the lab, it's best to keep it open in a tab.

† 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).