Toxcina King
Usually the only way that students could commend or complain about an instructor was through the formal paper teacher evaluations that get passed out at the end of every semester. Now, however, students are turning to a popular ratings Web site, RateMyProfessor.com, to voice their concerns.The Web site, recently sold to MTVU, MTV’s 24-hour college channel, has posted anonymous ratings of 846 professors at Pierce College from every academic department, based on good, average and poor quality performance levels.Some examples of RateMyProfessor (RMP) anonymous postings include a math instructor described as having “zero teaching ability who may be able to do the math themselves, but has no talent in conveying it to students.” Another posting describes a business administration professor as “fantastic, passionate and one of the best teachers I ever had.”Pierce sociology professor Charles Levy received high overall good quality ratings on the RMP Web site.”Students can tell when an instructor doesn’t know the subject matter or simply doesn’t care about it and if you don’t care, why should they?”, Levy said. “By-the-book instructors tend to turn off a lot of students. I believe in showing ample enthusiam for a subject, and being passionate about what you teach goes a long way.”As rating Web sites like RMP become more popular, more evaluations are available about each professor. This gives students a better idea about how the professor is perceived in general, as opposed to how the professor is perceived by one or two students. “I’ve been on the Web site and it’s interesting. You see comments from other students about the teachers and I think it’s cool,” child development student Naim Sima said. “People can read the comments and decide if they want to take that teacher.”Because rating sites are not flattering to all their subjects, there is growing concern that some postings raise a mountain of questions about a student’s freedom of expression, as the fast evolving Internet tests the boundaries of existing law.”RMP is very informative, but sometimes you still must take the professor who is plain awful, non-helpful and strict, which can ruin your grade point average,” said engineering student Randy Melendez. “Knowing my doom my be worse than personally experiencing it.” The most common concern among raters was instructor competence. According to the RMP, more than 70 percent of the ratings indicate something about an instructor’s intelligence or knowledge. These statements about the instructor’s intelligence were about five times as likely to be positive as negative. RMP has a disclaimer on its Web site that says the ratings are “not really” statistically valid. “Teachers should always bring the subject matter to a level that the students can understand,” said Levy. “Meaning, be as contemporary as possible with the material so it resonates. “Lastly, don’t ever underestimate any of the students. They want to learn, they want to be exposed to new ideas. Our job is to expose them to these new ideas and give them the cirtical tools to use them to the best of their ability.”In an attempt to respond to the criticism from professors of Web sites such as RMP and others, an anonymous editor who is only identified as a “tenured humanities professor from a college in the South” has struck back with an online forum called Rateyourstudents.blogspot.com (RYS). Similar to the model of RMP with a few exceptions, professors post comments exposing students often characterized as rude, brain dead, lazy, careless and stupid with an overwhelming sense of entitlement.One annoyed history professor posted comments on RYS that said, “Avoid this student if you can. She spends more on eyeliner than she does on textbooks. She wears more face powder than a 60-year-old stripper. She believes she’s destined for greatness; she’s destined to work at a laundromat.” The learning environment is not just a one-to-one, student-to-teacher nexus. It’s a multivariate space where interactions between students can exert strong effects on the overall classroom climate.The emergence of public forums such as RMP is becoming more and more important to a student’s class selection. However, students are cautioned not to take each posting literally, but to use these sites as an additional resource together with others who contribute a more accurate view of what the upcoming semester has in store.Students talk about teachers and school every day on the Internet. Either way, the things students say about teachers are going to be heard and Web sites such as RMP is just another way for them to voice their opinions.