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.



...As a result of their research, the Maine professors offer two recommendations — both of which are sure to be controversial and one of which they admit to having mixed feelings about. The recommendation that the professors make without hesitation is that colleges put their official student evaluations online. “Although students doubtless would applaud this move, many faculty would oppose it because of genuine concerns about privacy and the negative consequences,” the professors write. And indeed moves to put evaluations online have been controversial at some campuses.

But the article adds that “privacy is a thing of the past in the age of RMP, MySpace, and the like,” adding that not making such evaluations available creates its own set of problems. “Students will rely on what is publicly available,” and will thus not always be accurate in their assumptions, the Maine professors write.

The recommendation on which the authors admit to some “ambivalence” is this: “Predicated on the belief that RateMyProfessors.com is not going to go away, higher education institutions should consider encouraging their students to post ratings and comments on RMP,” they write. If a larger sample of students participate — and they are encouraged to be responsible in their rankings — “the potential value of that information to the institution would only be enhanced,” they write.