MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF STUDENT AND INSTRUCTOR/COURSE CHARACTERISTICS ON STUDENT RATINGS Fadia Nasser* , † and Knut A. Hagtvet** ................................................................................................ ................................................................................................ Multilevel SEM was used to examine the extent to which student, instructor, and course characteristics affect student ratings. Data were gathered from 1867 students enrolled in 117 courses at a large teacher training college in Israel. Four alternative two-level models that differ in only the nature of the relationship among interest in the course subject, expected grade, and student ratings were tested. Two of the models were judged as less appropriate, one because it failed to support the spurious relationship assumed between expected grade and student ratings, and the other on grounds of poor model-data fit. The other two models were equally good both in terms of the model-data fit and the amount of variance in student ratings that is accounted for by each of them. Both models supported the mediation effect of expected grade in the relationship between interest in the course subject and student ratings. ................................................................................................ ................................................................................................ KEY WORDS: student ratings; multilevel analysis; student characteristics; instructor characteristics. INTRODUCTION Student ratings of college teaching continue to be a controversial to- pic. Some instructors view students as an obvious and convenient choice as raters (e.g., Jackson et al., 1999), whereas others are convinced that students are essentially unqualified to provide a valid assessment of teaching quality (e.g., Bonetti, 1994). Despite these conflicting views, colleges and universities continue to collect data on teaching quality through the use of questionnaires administered to their students. The *School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel. **Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.  Address correspondence to: Fadia Nasser, School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, 69978, Israel. E-mail: fadia@post.tau.ac.il 559 0361-0365 ⁄ 06 ⁄ 0800-0559 ⁄ 0 Ó 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. Research in Higher Education, Vol. 47, No. 5, August 2006 (Ó 2006) DOI: 10.1007/s11162-005-9007-y