Rate My Lecturer/Professor

Are online academic rating sites even useful?

A lot of attention has been focussed recently on a series of new “grade your professor” web sites (Pick-A-Prof and Rate my Professors) and, while many academics believe the basic idea is good, others have mixed feelings about their ultimate usefulness.

In several Irish Universities, students have rated their lecturers and professors and their classes on everything from level of interest to workload to the professor’s presentation and teaching style. The information is not normally disseminated and no such database is available for graduate students opting for higher degree programmes leading to a MSc and/or Ph.D.

When the information is disseminated, it is deemed incredibly useful. In the US, for instance, Harvard students could spend the weeks surrounding registration sitting in restaurants, coffee shops, dining halls and libraries with their color-coded, cross-referenced copies of the Courses of Instruction and the CUE Guide splayed out around them, trying to balance their desire for a stimulating class with a manageable workload. And usually, the CUE Guide’s ratings were dead on—reliable, accurate, and honest.

However, more recently the CUE Guide shifted its data collection system, which eventually wreaked havoc on the otherwise excellent system. Instead of passing out surveys to students in class, thus creating a captive audience who had to complete the survey, the CUE went online and emailed students to request that they evaluate their classes. As the repeated—and increasingly frantic—emails soon proved, students just weren’t taking the surveys on their own time.

As a result these “rate my professors” sites began appearing throughout the US, Canada and the UK. The only students who really participated in the CUE surveys once they went online were the students who either absolutely loved or absolutely hated the class, skewing the data somewhat.

It is arguable that it’s still better to get some general information about a professor or lecturer before opting for a class or a programme of research than none at all, but users need to be wary of the inherently self-selecting evaluators.

There are plans in an advanced stage to introduce a similar system in Ireland whereby students can rate their professors and lecturers at all Irish Universities and Institutes of Technology in both their teaching and research portfolios.

With the advent of the drive to increase the total number of fourth level students at Irish Universities, such a database with appropriate oversight seems timely and would provide useful information for all impending graduate students.

Despite many concerns, it is clear the more informed a student is before choosing a class or Ph.D supervisor, the better.