This ain’t Lake Woebegon. All of the children are NOT above average.

Rate My Professors is already an app on FB. This allows FB users to access student-written reviews of professors and their grade histories.

There are a few reasons why I am glad to see these developments. I think students have a right to know in advance whether the prof they are thinking of taking a class from is a jerk. When everyone has access to every prof’s grading histories, via Pick a Prof, it can create pressure for the hard and easy instructors to move toward the average when it comes to assigning grades. The reviewing process online also creates a way for students to hold professors accountable for providing quality teaching.

I agree that you all have good points about how these kinds of online web sites can encourage the consumer-mindset of our students. And students are certainly not always the best judge of how much and whether they have learned things during the semester. One simple way to solve this dilemma might be for our departments to design a pre- and post-test for the freshmen survey classes. The students would be told that the test was part of their grade and the results would provide a useful measure of how much the students were learning over the course of the semester, as well as how different sections taught by different instructors compared. These department-provided tests could count for less than 5% of the overall grade, so professors wouldn’t have to feel like they were teaching to the test. In our 200, 300, and 400 level classes, I think students should be offered extra credit if they will keep a typed weekly journal that briefly tracks the teaching in their course and then submit it along with a one- or two-page report to the department chair or dean at the end of the semester. I think we should take the initiative in coming up with innovative ways to obtain teaching/course evaluations, before standards and practices emerge with new technologies that could shut out our input.

Finally, and this is the problem that most of my colleagues had when we discussed the move to online evaluations: we’re all convinced that our students will only fill them out when they are drunk or stoned. This may say more about what kind of students we ourselves were than about our students. It also fails to note that it could well be the case that students could be drunk or stoned in class on evaluation day as well….

My university has a website hosted by student government that features volunteer evaluations, but those suffer the same problmes as the Rate My Professor website–it’s only the really happy or the truly disgruntled who respond.