A Failing Grade for Online Assessment? (Part 1)

I'll admit I used a college professor rating site (as well as word of mouth recommendations) when choosing my undergraduate course schedule. Unclear teachers who were unwilling to help students were not worth my tuition dollars or time.

While an angry student (or two or three) can bring down a teacher's ratings out of spite, a truly good teacher's ratings should be a good reflection of his or her style.

Style can be what it comes down to - people have different learning styles. Getting a heads-up can help avoid a disastrous clash of learning and teaching styles that turn into a rocky semester and an unhappy grade.

Now that I'm a graduate student in a small program with a handful of professors, I don't have the option of basing my schedule on a rating system - one professor teaches each course so there are no choices!

"While an angry student (or two or three) can bring down a teacher's ratings out of spite, a truly good teacher's ratings should be a good reflection of his or her style."

I couldn't agree with you more on that. I think it's great to have sites like this, as long as we don't take it all too seriously. Look at the chili pepper factor for RateMyProfessors. While that's probably accurate, it's not something the site's owners can point to when critics cry foul.

Good luck with your studies. The graduate level of any field can be seem like night and day compared to earning your undergraduate degree!

I would also say that you can't lump RateMyTeachers.com and RateMyProfessors.com together. How you evaluate educators at the collegiate level comes from a perspective that is so much more expanded than most high school perspectives.

The addition of insight, maturity, and experience that comes from being at college would add much validity to this site and let's face it, the "do know work and blow off school" students at the high school level don't have professors because they don't go to college.

Although, that you can rate a professors "hotness" sure does do a good job taking away from that credibility.

"The part that makes me throw my hands up with this is that I have gotten great ratings from kids that I have never taught."

Excellent point! What actually sparked my interest in writing a commentary on these sites was that I recently read five or six posts under my name that were really favorable. They made me laugh and I was actually kind of flattered by some of them (except for the one that claimed I "play favorites" ). Well, the next time I checked I noticed, for whatever reason, they were all taken down. I assume they were all from the same ISP and maybe students were using school computers so the site's owners thought it was some kind of abuse/spam, but it struck me as odd. Well, at least we know someone's monitoring it.

I guess the real question there is: Are students smart enough to weed through the junk? Sometimes I question the judgment call, but it is their fault if they only choose classes based upon easiness and get a rude awakening. Most of the time, word of mouth combined with these scores makes it easier to make better informed decisions on which teachers/professors are good.

You need to weed out the outliers. The ones with 5's across the board but no constructive comments should be disregarded or removed. Same for 1's across the board with no explanation. Perhaps better monitoring and stricter guidelines for posting would help. Of course, making stricter rules on what is accepted may deter some. But I figure that the students who would provide constructive comments will still post and the ones that were just going to post "So-and-so sucks!!!!!!!!!" will be detered (with that many exclamation points).

Would it help if the straight 5's and 1's ratings were removed if they had no constructive comments? I would think so.

Stricter moderation might be the key. I think you are onto something, here.

I think that this can be very useful for teachers. Yes, you are going to get those students who won't like you no matter what you do, but it doesn't mean that their criticism can't improve you. Just like teachers provide constructive criticism on lab reports and essays, maybe this is just a way for students to provide their teachers constructive criticism without getting in trouble for it.

While students may not intend to provide such insight into how a teachers class is run, it doesn't mean that teachers can't use the information to their advantage to improve. Hopefully, making minor adjustments to the way classes are run will conclude with higher marks on RateMyProfessor.com (or in this case RateMyTeacher.com).

Sometimes negative comments are hard to swallow, but they may be necessary to improving.

It doesn't mean that their criticism can't improve you.

You are assuming, of course, they leave a comment that gives you even a vague idea of what their gripe is. Many negative posts give no feedback at all. Here are some real comments from teachers who received low ratings (all 1's or a mix of 1's and 2's):

• "She must like memorize the year books. She knows everyones name, the first time she has them. Its so stupid."
• "he's...psychotic, needs therapy and a bath"
• "dumbest teacher in the school... we actually made her cry"
• "he doesn't like campbells soup. he's a forgein exchange student from tennasie!!!"
• "has some not so nice features"
• "No wonder she's not married..."

Now look at some from the flip side where ratings were all or mostly 5's:

• "AWSOME"
• "mr.h is the bomb"
• "The best teacher I have ever had and probably ever will have."
• "I love her. She is awesome. I have her for Child Studies and she is soo awesome."

These comments are so vague that it is hard to build on them and become better. Some are also just downright hurtful and mean spirited. If you don't know what you are doing poorly or what you are doing well, what do you throw out and what do you keep?

There is also a feature at the bottom that lets students know what other teachers are similar except it just randomly cycles through all the other teachers so if you click refresh enough, each teacher will eventually display every other teacher in the district. It is a total sham.

There is do doubt that feedback can make anyone better at what they do. But until this site gets some level of credible substance, it is largely a waste of time.

"She must like memorize the year books. She knows everyones name, the first time she has them. Its so stupid."

Wow, being prepared and actually knowing students' names is a bad thing? Jeesh, I loved when teachers learned names quickly. With the amount of kids going through school these days, it can't be easy to remember them all - but I always thought it was nice when they knew me... it made me feel like they were more interested in helping me do well.

And as for memorizing the books, I'd imagine that after teaching The Scarlet Letter or something enough times, it just happens. This too only helps students as the teachers (in my experience, at least) point out things they might've missed in their reading. But then again, when I was in HS, most of my classmates never did the reading anyway. I guess this is why talking about the books in detail is so bothersome and "so stupid".

I mean, I was by no means nice to all my teachers. Luckily, if this was around at the time, I was unaware. I had a couple teachers that I constantly butted heads with. Not surprisingly, those teachers were all in disciplines that I had no interest in. While I'm not trying to generalize, I do not think that taking frustration of a subject out on the teacher is uncommon.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I gave one teacher a particularly hard time in school. Was she mean to me or put me down? No. She just happened to be a science teacher. Later I was working at a grocery store that she shopped at. One day I apologized to her and the next time she saw my mother she even commented on how much it had meant to her. If I had access to a site like this when I was younger, as I'm sure I would've posted some things that I would now regret.

What I'm trying to get at is this - sites like RateMyTeacher can be useful - like SavvyExacta mentioned. But in HS it's easy to berate and trash a teacher soley because your young, possibly frustrated, or just mean.

I don't think that the site has little credible substance. I think it has quite a bit and a lot more potential. But stricter moderation may be the key to making sure that these comments/ratings don't appear in the first place. It isn't about sparing the feelings of the teachers (no offense intended), it is about providing constructive reasoning behind the rating (which "No wonder she isn't married..." isn't providing). Some just sound like people that have a problem with the teacher/professor and others are blinded by reality (hopefully the "AWSOME" comment wasn't for an English teacher...).

Perhaps if the site focused on preventing unconstructive comments (which aren't helpful to teachers or students, whether they are positively or negatively oriented) from appearing on the site, the site would have more credibility. If that only leaves one or two constructive comments, then so be it. At least you didn't have to pick through garbage to get there.

If by sparing feelings you mean by providing honest, critical comments, I agree.

You can't expect teachers to go to a site where comments like some of the ones I listed persist. Being told it is no surprise you aren't married is mean spirited. Until RateMyTeachers.com gets serious about their product, it might remain a great place to vent about teachers you like or gush about teachers you loved, but a vehicle to improve education, it is not.

I have used RateMyProfessor a couple of times to choose professors and I think they have a better set-up. You have the option of listing classes you had with them. Sometimes you get "wishy-washy" comments, but other times, you get well thought out constructive comments on their site.

Perhaps high schoolers are just too juvenille to provide feedback that is constructive. If this is the case, I say just scrap the idea.

I find that they take the time to be thoughtful and constructive in the written form. I also spend a lot of time explaining how being critical won't affect a grade if their criticism are substantiated with examples so I can actually learn from them.

It is the anonymous, on-line forum that has shown itself to be of little use.

I think you said it best earlier, Jaxy, when you said that it needed tighter moderation to be worthwhile.

Never had the opportunity to do on-line teacher ratings; they didnt come into vogue until I was nearly finished my degrees. Also. my engineering and science classes were small by todays standards generally allowing better student to professor contact. Usually, unless a teacher is lecturing to a very large class where students don't know one another (and don't talk together) or where the underclassmen don't fraternize with the upperclassmen, word of a teachers abilities and other issues will normally get around quickly and students will not take the class from that professor and will select other professors teaching the same material. This of course shows up in the professors profiles on ability to retain students.

One thing I did not observe in university settings is department heads or other tenured professors sitting in on each others classes on a spot basis; thereby allowing the opportunity to give constructive criticism if appropriate. Typically, in primary and secondary school settings, a teacher will be evealuated fairly frequently by the schools principal or vice-principal.

In my experience there are great teachers and there are ho-hum teachers. If a professor is truly interested in their students success in school, they will go to extraordinary efforts to guarantee the student understands the course material. Case in point: In undergrad school, our engineering class had it's first course in Thermodynamics. It was taught by a professor who was heavy into the mathematical side of the subject, but none of the students had the proper mathematical background for the level of math involved. Students asked no questions and the prof was astonished that everyone failed the first major exam. After discussing the issue with several other students, I elected myself spokesman and approached the professor and indicated no one had a clue about what he was talking about. Two other professors sharing the same office space guffawed (under their breath) and one professor (who was very student success oriented) then spoke up and said he understood were the problem was and that if I got the other students together 3 days/week at lunchtime he would tutor us and guarantee we understood the material. This was done and everyone got up to speed. BTW, the 2nd professor said he had an ulterior motive in that he taught the 2nd term of the Thermodynamics course so he would have to deal with the students abilities sooner or later. We need more committed teachers like him.