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Tuesday, June 05, 2007
UD is So Not Surprised. She's been touting Rate My Professors for years, over the endless bitter objections of many professors. Now Kornfield and Coladarci, two University of Maine professors, have, reports this morning's Inside Higher Education, produced a study showing a "high correlation [between RMP and] the kinds of student evaluations that colleges see as more valid [that is, between RMP and the in-house evaluations colleges fashion for themselves]. The overlap is highest among those professors who are popular on RateMyProfessors.com — they also do extremely well with traditional student evaluations. “The pattern of this association suggests that when an instructor’s RMP overall quality is particularly high, one can infer that the instructor ‘truly’ is regarded as a laudatory teacher,” the study says. However, the correlations are much weaker for those who don’t score well, so Coladarci is much more hesitant to assume that poor RateMyProfessors.com ratings are equally meaningful. For UD, as faithful readers know, RMP is most revealing as an immensely powerful attack on Powerpoint use among professors. Read with any care, RMP makes clear that students rightly detest the widespead cynical and lazy use of this technology among their instructors. But UD is also pleased to see her instincts about RMP confirmed in this early study. And pleased to see Kornfield and Coladarci's recommendations. |