Ward Cleaver as “hot’

My office neighbor has won the campus teaching award. Also, IMHO, he’s similar to Ward Cleaver — friendly, patient, and normal-decent. Like your favorite uncle, or the late Mr. Rogers.

He recently got a “hot” designation on RATE. So, how useful is RATE? Oh, about as much as your typical doctoral dissertation.

R.A.S., at 6:50 am EDT on July 28, 2006

Like a party...

“...it’s as if the student has met the professor a few times at a party, rather than as a member of his or her class for a semester.”

You’ve really hit upon the key point here. Many students (though not all) don’t actually distinguish much among the many roles they play — son/daughter, sibling, friend, student, employee, lover. (Don’t take my word for it. Just observe the similarity in the ways many students dress and speak across all of these various roles.) Thus, they are often unable to make comments that are relevant to the context. So, many acutally *do* evaluate professors much as they would have evaluated someone they had met at a party, and they rate courses along much the same lines as they would rate the party itself. (Ditto for in-class evaluations. Oh, sure, they are answering questions putatively about profs’ “knowledge” and “organization,” but the high correlations among the answers to virtually all the questions show that there’s really only one thing underlying the answers, and I’d venture to guess that it is essentially how much they like the prof as an indiviudal... based in part on how much they think the prof “likes” them [read: grades].)

So don’t take your RATE numbers — whether good or bad — all that seriously. They’re only telling you, essentially, if you were a good (Wed., 9-12) “date.”

This is NOT to say that there shouldn’t be student input on teaching performance. There should. But the methods we have arrived at are all too often crude, misleading, and, in the end, not terribly informative.

A Once “Hot” Prof, at 11:15 am EDT on July 28, 2006

Whine, Whine, Whine

The Editor’s comment crystallizes the author’s lack of understanding regarding RateMyProfessors, IMHO. Way to go, ed!

What does this commentary add to the discussion? Do we need more snarky academic analyses of RateMyProfessors?

Here’s a novel idea ... if you think you can make a website that does a better job than RateMyProfessors then shut up and get to it. I assure you that I would embrace a better public evaluative tool, as I suspect would a lot of students and teachers (not to mention parents and administrators). Until that time, I’m glad RateMyProfessors exists — despite all of its shortcomings — and I will continue to encourage my students to use it responsibly.

P.S. Why does Inside Higher Ed choose to run rants like this? I thought they were trying to do better than the Chronicle of Higher Education. Perhaps I was mistaken.

Ron Schott, Dr. at Fort Hays State University, at 11:45 am EDT on July 28, 2006

A different point of view...

Perhaps it’s because I’m a parent, not an academic, and perhaps because I’ve been looking on “Rate My Teacher” which is geared more toward high school, but I’ve had a completely different experience with this web site.

My daughter is quite intelligent and perceptive, but was very unmotivated by high school (she’s doing great in college). Her teachers ranged from excellent to horrible with all gradations in between. So I asked her opinions of them and then compared them to what appeared on the website. The teachers she felt were dreadful received consistently low ratings, and the ones she found interesting and inspiring received consistently high ratings. This had nothing to do with grades, because some of the teachers she ranked as tough but great had given her C’s, and the awful (but easy) had given her A’s. Since I volunteered on campus quite a bit I had the opportunity to ask other students their opinions about various teachers. Their remarks were extremely perceptive and all related to how well the teacher taught, how engaged they were with their subject, and their respect — or lack of it — for their students. Not one of them mentioned grades. I proposed to the Principal that graduating students be able to fill out an “exit interview” on what they thought was best and worst about their school. After professing to care profoundly about the students’ opinions, she rejected the idea completely. As a side note, she personally received a 1.6 on the site and was forced out at the end of the year by a revolt of both students and teachers who were fed up with her. Food for thought....

RANDI HUTCHINSON, at 2:05 pm EDT on July 28, 2006

Student evals, etc.

What do any of these ratings mean anyway? I’ve found very little correlation between any of them and anything else over the last 40+ years. (And yes — it has been that long.)

My own personal favorite student comment is the one I got my very first term as an Ass’t Prof. “this is undoubtedly the worst lecturer I’ve ever had. On the other hand, it may possibly be the best professor.’ That from a 2nd year grad student. Well, I hope I improved.

Our forms kept changing, as I suppose everyone else’s have. One question I used to like was the one about how many hours a week the student felt were put into the class. I’ll admit to being quite pleased to find that for 6 straight years, I ‘won’ that one across the entire University, every term. While I’m sure that some (most?)of the estimates were exaggerated, it was a great comfort to see that my students were at least claiming to be doing more work for me than for anyone else. If you don’t work, you don’t learn. And learning is what it’s all about, isn’t it?

So — what use was made of these? If the Chair wanted to sit on you, he would point out ‘deficiencies’ in your eval’s. Otherwise, nothing. Frankly, mine were always middle of the road, aside from the ‘work’ one, which was abolished, alas.

In the meantime, somehow or other, I ended up with a number of teaching awards, all starting from student nominations and campaigns. This was over a span of a bit better than 30 years, incidentally, so it appears that there was a fair amount of consistency in whatever I was doing. They were All — University ones, not departmental.

So, although I always read and thought about the written comments, a number of which alerted me to things I had not been aware of, I have tended to ignore the numerical scores. They simply did not tally at all with anything I could identify or do anything about. I never seem to have made it into RATE.

Oh yes, I started in physics and moved into mechanical engineering, but have taught all sorts of things for non-scientists as well.

So — it looks to me as though we don’t really have anything yet that is of much help in the improvement of instruction. I won’t say ‘teaching;’nobody has ever taught a student anything. All we do is somehow or other manage to get students to learn. The learning is the essential item in all of this, isn’t it?

ERT, Professor (retired), at 3:20 pm EDT on July 28, 2006

Cognitive Dissonance

I have, to my knowledge, never received a red pepper for hotness on ratemyprofessor.com. I have received many, however, from the administration at my college. That is to say, I have been charged with talking about my own sexuality, the comical and the quirky, with the intention of arousing and seducing my students. For example, when teaching James Joyce’s “The Boarding House,” I ask my students why the character Bob Doran is described as having a “reddish beard [which] fringed his jaws ….” Most students do not know. They seem never to have formally learned, nor to have picked up by cultural osmosis, the implications of red hair. A few will observe that it might have something to do with Doran’s Irishness, his “fiery” nature. Of course, Doran is not only a wimp but Virgin-and-Wimp. The last thing he would do is risk expressing temper in public, lest he lose his job or tarnish his reputation.

I say to the students, then, that red hair can be an indicator in literature of something erotic. Authors, who often incorporate such stereotypes, count on their readers’ awareness. To illustrate, I cite “To Room 19,” a tale by Doris Lessing where the psychotic main character keeps seeing a red-haired Leprechaun “in her garden.” I may or may not additionally comment on the RD (reptile dysfunction) dimension, as a serpent slithers hither with the ‘chaun. To illustrate the osmotic process, I recount an erotic dream I had when myself a college student. (Er, used to recount. I have been forbidden to use this anecdote.) I found myself in a bedroom wherein a naked classmate—she of the long and radiant red mane—lay upon a white sheet, her scarlet hair tumbling over the side of the bed, flowing across the floor all the way to the wall, and flickering up the wall in tongues of fire. Dreams can do that. I conclude this brief account by mentioning that it was my first successful encounter with the succubus, that no nuns or priests burst through the closed door, demanding to know just what’s going on here or just what do I think I am trying to pull off. This accurate aside of a “recovering Catholic” is just the sort of snarky ad lib of which Mr. Joyce might approve, himself having been banned in Ireland by the Established Faith for many decades.

Then I point out that Doran’s red hair is a symbolic reminder that, yes, he was capable of being zinged by Cupid’s arrows, despite his de facto celibacy. However, he wasn’t THAT lusty, hence the aforementioned “fringe.” A career virgin, was the lad, who found he had just enough fervor to get his arse in a jam. (I say “arse” because “ass” is banned on my campus, as being inherently and necessarily constitutive of “sexual harassment.” “Arse” may be under review, as also causing a “hostile environment.”) But, alas, I may relate this anecdote no more. It is too “hot,” too seductive. That is to say, it is too hot for the mismanagers of my college, who, along with their highly paid attorneys, project their own panty-raiding proclivities upon my person. (They do this with full complicity of federal judges in the Sixth Circuit, who have every confidence that local definitions of “sexual harassment” must always trump an erstwhile free people’s Bill of Rights.)

So, some professors who do not rate chili peppers abroad may have a drawer full at home.

John C. Bonnell, professor at Macomb Community College, at 5:25 pm EDT on July 28, 2006

“Since there is precisely no guarantee that the people doing the rating have ever worked with the instructor being rated, the site’s “shortcomings” swallow up any potential benefits it may offer. For the same reason, there is no way to use the site “responsibly,” except by stressing to students that comments there bear no verifiable relation to the instructor or course in question.”

In practice, this is not really the case though. I suppose this is difficult to see if you have never used it, but most often people have no desire to post comments on people they don’t know. I suppose professors/instructors are really the only ones who have such an inclination, and I guess it would be best if they could be banned from the site altogether (both viewing and posting). I don’t think this is what the people here are calling for, though.

I don’t think you are right when you say there is “no verifiable relation", unless you are creating a very strict definition of “verifiable". A simple way is to take the person’s course and see how your subjective opinion matches what is already on ratemyprofessor.com. That is “verified” for most people. I’m assuming that the primary use for the site is to check it when deciding on who to take, and ranking them after you are finished. In other words, it increases student utility with the small price (or another benefit?) of subverting the traditional power monopoly in the classroom.

meb, at 8:35 pm EDT on July 28, 2006

Re: Rating professors

Students have a right to comment on their teachers. I’m surprised though that any faculty take these comments seriously, since the approach violates even the most elementary statistical principles we teach in STAT 101! The ’students’ are not representative at all or even verifiable students, they are totally self selected...

By comparison the maligned regular evaluations are a model of statistical purity.

One short anecdote: a serious and capable young colleague (according to her regular evaluations) had 3 comments. One positive about her teaching, and 2 praising her physical configuration. Fortunately those were deleted after a year, but still...

PJ, at 9:40 am EDT on July 29, 2006

What should we evaluate?

The problem with most evaluative instruments — whether they are student or peer evaluations — is that they are focused on the professor’s behavior: does he answer questions? Does she make her office hours? Does he summarize at the end of his lecture? Does she arrange her desks in a circle? Does he shine his shoes?

But the case has yet to be made that any of these particular behaviors necessarily lead to student learning. Take the broad RATE category of “helpfulness.” Well, in some ways I refuse to “help” my students in ways they’d like help because I am trying to foster a certain level of independence and self reliance (e.g., telling them to look things up rather than simply telling them what they want in order to develop the habit of resorting to standard disciplinary references: I’m really “helping” them in that way, I suppose, but many don’t see it that way). And I’m probably not the only one who sees “Easiness” and “Helpfulness” as, at a certain level, mutually exclusive. Easy courses, in the end, are rarely helpful: if a student already knows how to do something, she doesn’t need a course for it.

So quod quaeritis? What we really want to know is not how the professor behaved, but what (or if) the students learned. The mind boggles, though, at the challenges of developing an evaluative instrument to measure that.

Then again, we do assign grades ...

John Marlin, The College of St. Elizabeth, at 12:50 pm EDT on July 29, 2006

Not quite anonymous

“Even the student who writes in the most personal comments (e.g. “hates deodorant") is completely safe from local retribution — never mind accountability — because the medium is so completely anonymous.”

I beg to differ. About two years ago, I had a professor who received a bad rating on RATE, and she was able to get the student’s IP address and look him/her up. How, I have no clue, but she did it, and consequently (and anonymously) uninvited the student to her end-of-the-semester breakfast at her house. “You know who you are,” she said.

Glad I gave her a decent review...

JM, at 10:20 am EDT on July 31, 2006

No, the ratings on ‘RATE’ are far from the most reliable, yes, there are gossipy aspects as well as unfavorable reviews from disgruntled students who received bad grades.

However, when I look up a particular professor and see that he/she has 39 ratings and they are all unfavorable ones, that professor can deny, deny, deny or dismiss all they want, but frankly, they most likely deserved the ratings they got. Students who take the time out to submit ratings usually do so in either a love or hate situation. One of the best professors I have ever had has 40something reviews, and almost all say things like ‘best professor I’ve ever had’ ‘best professor this school has’ ‘amazing’ etc. And for the skeptical let me just add that this professor is also extremely demanding, assigns a ton of work and is a very tough grader. Many students can appreciate a good professor when they encounter one.

As a student I also pay (a LOT) of money for my college education. When I graduate next year I will be about $20,000 in debt from student loans. Bad professors waste my time and my money. I do not take the rating on ‘RATE’ as gospel but I do pay attention if there is a great number of negative/positive reviews for a certain professor.

Students talk, and if the professor is particularly awful, word will get around. Still, it’s better to find out sooner than later if possible — as in before you waste an entire semester finding out.

I’ve also found that many professors who have a high number of negative reviews are among the first to decry the ‘RATE’ site. That isn’t always the case of course but when it is, then sometimes a spade is a spade.

Liz, college student, at 3:45 pm EDT on July 31, 2006

My son doubled his GPA after discovering RateMyProfessors.com. What does that say about the state of U.S. colleges and the significance of the almighty GPA? What does that say about the value of a college education?

Jay, at 11:46 am EDT on August 1, 2006

RMP is a more sophisticated technology for gossiping about professors. But the problem is not with students using it among themselves. The grapevine has always existed. Sometimes the word of mouth is accurate, sometimes not, let the buyer beware.

The real problems arise when universities actually use RMP openly or surreptitiously as part of an evaluation process — even a ‘little’ part.Consider this example: female academics appear to be judged more harshly in terms of dress, appearance, behavior, etc.

This bias shows up in many ways. A female colleague of mine was taken to task on RMP for insisting on being called ‘Dr.’ Yet there are male professors in my college who are also particular about how they are addressed, but the students don’t object. You can be a curmudgeon, sloppily dressed, absent-minded, and much else, and get away with it when you’re a male academic.

Now somebody may object that a committee can just ignore extraneous stuff. But if criticism of externals crowds out positive comments on teaching then a female will appear deficient by the lack of positive comments.

It is not necessary to get into a grand discussion why this is so. It just is. To the extent that this bias spills over to the comments on RMP, for an evaluation committee to use RMP violates EEO law, it seems to me.

I am surprised that the potential for discrimination doesn’t generate more reaction. Where are all those EEO and diversity officials when we really need them?

PJ, at 4:35 pm EDT on August 3, 2006

Students Evals.

Professors endlessly discuss whether student-evaluations are just, fair, useful or not. Whate do not discuss is whether this student-as-customer perspective is valid in the first place.

I decided long ago that students are not customers. Society and civilization are the customers of institutions of learning. It is they who should be looked to. Perhaps, we should all ask, “Well, Scorates. How’m I doin’?”

CLW

CLW, Professor at PSU, at 8:10 am EDT on October 16, 2006