Rate your professor
Most students have heard of, or perhaps used, ratemyprofessors.com which is a popular website for most people attending college. I haven’t used the site much, mostly because the courses I am required to take for my degree are taught by only one faculty member, and as such, it’s not really going to do me much good to look up said professor’s ratings since I can’t avoid him or her anyway. I find that in this case, going in knowing next to nothing about how a professor is allows me to form my own opinions rather than labelling the professor as “bad” before I even set foot in the room. Nonetheless, if I were at a larger school in a different program where one could choose the professor one took a class with, I would probably use the site.
I believe that the site is a great playing field-leveler. While most students at my school fill out course/professor review scantrons at the end of the semester, no one really knows what happens to them. I believe that the professor who teaches the class decides what to do with them. I’m fairly certain the administration doesn’t touch them simply because of their attitude towards students in general. Anyway, I digress. Back to what I was saying — services like ratemyprofessors.com force the administration to deal with the problem of bad teachers. Most everyone that I know of in higher education has had some professors who just don’t care about teaching — they’re there for the grant money and research opportunities. As a result you end up with some truly awful professors who are well-regarded by the school because of the prestige and money that they bring in, despite the fact that they should never, ever step foot inside a classroom.
If a site like ratemyprofessors.com can change how professors are vieed in the eyes of the school administration, this can only be a good thing. But these school administrators, rather than embrace the service, are understandably irritated. In face, quite a few schools have threatened to sue the site for publishing defamatory comments.
Westhues finds that professors and administrations are “deeply threatened” by the site in part because work with students has generally been a very minor part of a faculty member’s evaluation. When doling out grants of tenure, promotions and raises, universities look mainly at a professor’s scholarship and publications. But RateMyProfessors, Westhues said, is forcing administrations to take a professor’s teaching capability more seriously.
“Here’s this tenured professor with high rank and high salary and students say he’s a disaster in the classroom,” he said. “RateMyProfessors gets that information out into the open.”
But the trouble with that, critics say, is there’s no guarantee it’s accurate.
And this last sentence is quite true. My only personal experience with ratemyprofessors.com is from almost 3 years ago when a professor came into class in tears because she had looked at her rating on ratemyprofessors.com. Someone had written something negative about her, and she took it to heart. And the comment, I’m sorry to say was inaccurate — clearly written by someone who expected to have a good grade handed to them on a silver platter. I understand this student’s frustration though, because our particular section of the class was much harder than the other professors’ sections who allowed open-book and take-home exams. By taking her class, we got no extra credit; it was not considered an “honors-level” section, though it should have been because everyone worked much harder for her than they would have in another section. I am a firm believer in parity among class sections. Regardless, I felt bad for that professor simply because she truly cared about the students as people as well as future professionals.
So one malicious comment against one otherwise good teacher can leave them with what amounts to a black eye for their self-esteem, because as always extreme opinions elicit extreme responses: those that love a prof or hate a prof are that much more likely to rate or write a review of said professor. More neutral (some would say “more accurate”) views tend to go unpublished because the students that hold those views have no motivation to act. So while the system isn’t perfect, it is certainly better than no system at all: it is forcing schools to look more closely at who they allow to teach students. Perhaps with time and a little luck, experiences like this guy’s won’t happen as often. I won’t hold my breath, though.
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