When Students Evaluate Faculty Online

by Jennifer C. Berkshire

When it was time for Eastern Connecticut State student Jonathan Marsh* to evaluate his math teacher last fall, he had no problem identifying what was wrong with her. She gave too many quizzes, concluded Marsh, and a thick accent made her lectures difficult to understand. In the past, Marsh’s comments would have reached a fairly limited audience, going first to the teacher herself, before making their way to the math department chair and on to other university administrators.

That was in the old days. This time, Marsh chose a new approach to grading his professor: he posted comments and a grade — a “D” — in the case of this particular teacher to a new on-line evaluation site, teacherreviews.com, one of a growing number of sites that allows students to do the grading.The best known sites have already attracted tens of thousands of students from hundreds of colleges and universities across the country. The students don’t hesitate to rate the faculty who instruct them in subjects ranging from philosophy to physical education. But while students such as Jonathan Marsh are flocking to sites that let them praise or pan their profs, reviews by faculty on the receiving end of the high tech report cards have been decidedly mixed.

StudentEvaluations.com

The last test taken, the final paper handed in, college students across the country embark on a familiar ritual: they fill in standardized evaluation forms, distilling a semester’s worth of teaching down to a column of penciled-in bubbles. But while the results of these evaluations may play an important role in faculty promotion decisions, many students complain that the forms are all but useless when it comes to what they really want to know: which classes to take — and which to avoid like the plague.

“Students are more likely to be honest about a boring teacher when it’s on their own time,” says Melissa Konal, a student at Michigan State University, where students have access to an exclusive ratings site called MSU.WeGrade.com, designed by an alumna of the school. “You probably pick your professor now because the class time is convenient or the room is nearby,” reads the introduction to one on-line evaluation site, ratingsonline.com. “Sometimes you get a professor who’s [sic] teaching style or personality makes the semester a living hell. Reading the opinions of the students who took your class last semester is the best way to avoid this problem.”

Designed for students and often by students (or at least former students), these evaluation sites are a dramatic departure from their staid classroom counterparts. Ratemyprofessors.com, one of 650 “Rate My” domains operated by the Washington, D.C.-based iM Connected, Inc., allows students to assign grades to their teachers based on three ratings categories: easiness, helpfulness, and clarity. They can even judge whether a particular teacher is “hot,” and hence worthy of a tiny chili pepper symbol. It’s far and away the “largest and fastest growing on-line destination for publicly grading and rating professors,” says Michael Hussey, founder and president of the RateMy Network. Recently, the group has spawned a Canadian version of the site and a counterpart for high school students. A combination of anonymity, easy to use ratings, and unfiltered commentary has proven to be a popular lure; in its first six months of operations, ratemyprofessors.com claims to have gathered more than 76,000 ratings.

Students drop by to say their piece, then troll through a collection of funniest ratings.

“He will destroy you like an academic ninja,” writes one student.

“Your pillow will need a pillow,” writes another.

The site’s real value though, concludes Hussey, is not measured in laughs, but in the number of students who come away with useful information.

“We receive daily e-mails expressing students’ gratitude for our service. When RateMyProfessors propagates through a school, and a professor is rated by many students, those ratings tell a general story. More people are exposed to the valid opinions of students.”

Like others in the academic ratings business, Hussey says that his interest in the idea of publicly grading professors was borne of personal experience: “I had some horrible professors who had no business teaching and never received good student reviews,” he says. “Until now, new students had no way of avoiding these people.”

Faculty Talk Back

While tens of thousands of students take advantage of the opportunity to flatter or flog their professors on-line, the professors themselves are considerably less enthusiastic about the technology — or at least the use being made of it. Since the on-line review sites burst into the spotlight two years ago, faculty on dozens of campuses have spoken out against them, warning that anonymous ratings of professors are not only useless as an evaluation tool, but are also potentially libelous. At Monmouth University, administrators went so far as to consider severing the school’s connection to virtualratings.com after several students posted vulgar comments about their teachers.

Administrators including Provost Thomas Pearson were concerned that the anonymity of the postings encouraged students to abuse the forum.

“Students should feel responsible and empowered enough to make their comments directly to the faculty,” says Pearson in an article in The Outlook, Monmouth University’s student-run newspaper.

Others lament a phenomenon that they view as anti-intellectual, a further manifestation of a higher education system that encourages students to view themselves as consumers who have purchased an academic product.

“It’s a sort of Consumer Reports for higher education,” says Valerie Ross, director of the Summer Sessions program at the University of Pennsylvania. “Students are positioned as consumers, then given the opportunity to cast meaningless votes on the professor or class they purchased.”

Much of the debate regarding the on-line review sites centers on their emphasis on “easiness” as a primary criterion. Ratemyprofessors.com, for example, instructs students to ask themselves “How easy are the classes that this professor teaches?” and “Is it possible to get an A without too much work?”

That’s the problem with student evaluations in general, concludes Andrew Cole, an assistant professor of English at the University of Georgia.

“The notion of rating professors is absurd, particularly when you take grade inflation into account. Every student wants and ‘deserves’ an ‘A,” says Cole, noting that more challenging professors routinely receive lower ratings than their “easier” counterparts.

Cole is also critical of evaluations that ask students to assess the professor’s command of a particular subject, questioning whether students are really in a position to judge.

Exchanging Information Vs. Trading Insults

Despite the negative attention that sites like ratemyprofessors.com and collegesucks.com have garnered, not all faculty members are convinced that allowing students to exchange advice or tips about particular teachers is such a bad thing.

“Any mechanism that allows students to share information rather than just keeping it all private seems like a good idea to me,” says Miami University (of Ohio) English professor Mary Jean Corbett.

And as for concerns that students are trading insults instead of offering up constructive criticism?

“They do that anyway,” says Corbett, noting that she welcomes the opportunity to hear their remarks for herself.

The on-line review sites come with another advantage too: unlike traditional evaluations administered by individual institutions, these sites make no distinction among faculty ranking. Whether you’re an adjunct surviving from course to course or the occupant of an endowed chair, you are simply another name on sites such as teacherreviews.com and virtualratings.com. Students who rate their teachers on the basis of clarity, easiness, and helpfulness are asked to make no distinction between the tenured and the temporary.

Dr. Michael Kuo, an adjunct instructor of English at Eastern Illinois University, says that he has no qualms about being judged on one of the on-line review sites; so far his name hasn’t turned up on any of them. Teachers in general worry too much about how their students will evaluate them, says Kuo. “Teachers are some of the most paranoid individuals on the planet, and many of them fear student evaluations more than death itself.”

The key, Kuo concludes, is to concentrate on being good teachers. And if he ends up with a low cyber-rating himself one day?

“Students have every right to maintain forums about the quality of their education,” says Kuo, sounding like he means it.

*Jonathan Marsh is a pseudonym.