EconTech

Rating RateMyProfessors.com

You’ve heard the reasons why professors don’t trust RateMyProfessors.com, the Web site to which students flock. Students who don’t do the work have equal say with those who do. The best way to get good ratings is to be relatively easy on grades, good looking or both, and so forth. But what if the much derided Web site’s rankings have a high correlation with markers that are more widely accepted as measures of faculty performance? Last year, a scholarly study found a high correlation between RateMyProfessors.com and a university’s own system of student evaluations. Now, a new study is finding a high correlation between RateMyProfessors and a student evaluation system used nationally.

Strike another victory for Web 2.0.  Here is more.

I am going to say that the correlation between the website and the traditional student evaluations is not surprising: traditional student evaluations are pretty terrible. I always felt the questions were lacking. Then a professor notified me that he had gotten hold of statistics that showed a high correlation between grades and student satisfaction with the course. Then I found that that my putting my name on the evaluations was useless because they were re-typed so the professor would be unable to recognize the handwriting. This bothered me because I wanted the professor to be able to contact me about any comments he had questions about or wanted to discuss further. (I really don’t usually care about anonymity!) Often students don’t take the time to offer particularly thoughtful recommendations for the course. And the format (fill this form out in the next 10 minutes before he next class kicks you out of the room, the last person done takes it to the drop box on the other side of campus) is not particularly conducive to a cogent evaluation.

I don’t know if the website mentioned is any good. I rather doubt it. But I would expect it to mimic traditional recommendations, which I also rarely found it wise to rely on.