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Sunday, February 05, 2006
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The Ratings War The excellent blog acta-online calls Rate My Professors “notoriously unreliable, unregulated, and often gratuitously cruel,” and plenty of observers agree. Plenty of observers also agree with acta-online that the subsequent invention of the Rate Your Students site merely ups the vindictive ante between students and their professors. And thus the whole thing is alarming, etc. UD begs to dinner. (When UD’s spawn was very small, she once said she begged to dinner instead of begged to differ. UD and her husband so liked the usage that they adopted it.) As some sort of libertarian, UD of course has no problem with the existence of phenomena such as RMP and RYS; but, more than that, she suspects that RMP (she hasn’t had a chance to look with any care at RYS) is a good thing. RMP satisfies Aristotle’s requirements for art: it both pleases and instructs. It is extremely funny, and, in an admittedly narrow sense, it tells you things that are true. UD was struck, for instance, by the uncanny insight into character some of the commenters possess. Watching a professor in a classroom over the course of fourteen weeks grants access in an odd but intense way to that person’s being. While you’ll never know them well, you’ll know them (if you look carefully and have some insight) in some valuable ways: Are they pretentious? Anxious about what people think of them? At ease in their own skin? Depressives? Resentment-harborers? Lacking any sense of humor? Yes, plenty of RMP commenters satisfy themselves with He sucks. But a lot also think with some seriousness about why certain professors seemed to them to fail in the classroom. Official course evaluation forms are, in UD’s experience, pretty insipid; they tend to yield nothing or platitudes. RMP on the other hand sometimes yields sharp and thoughtful observations. And if you read a lot of the blue frowning faces that designate low scores, you conclude (UD concludes) that bad teachers are bad in a limited number of ways. Here they are: 1.) They don’t speak English. Or they speak such bad and/or heavily accented English that they cannot be understood. 2.) They are punitive ideologues. 3.) Because they are pursuing a more satisfying career somewhere else and only teach because they have to, they miss a lot of classes, lard things up with guest speakers, and show movies. 4.) They are boring human beings and inept public speakers. That’s pretty much it, and we pretty much already knew this, but RMP confirms it again and again. I think that’s a useful service and should probably be taken seriously by universities that yield a striking number of these sorts of comments for their faculty. UD doubts that high RMP scores (in the 4 - 5 range) are all that useful for assessment. But when twenty or so students write to RMP and give a professor an overall rating of 1.1, that means a lot. |