Search This Blog

Monday, February 20, 2006

How do YOU rate?...

Found this over on the Education Wonks

An anonymous teacher rating site: http://www.ratemyteachers.com/

This is NOT a new concept!

Way back in the age of LSD, hippys, flower-power, Vietnam protests, there existed the same resource at the university I attended. It was a resource called: “The Tower List”. It was an underground student published pamphlet of professor rating scores and student comments about the professors on campus.

It was, understandably, the most popular book on campus. It was also the most hated publication, by low rated professors, on campus.

As a direct result of the “The List”, the classes of the “A/B” rated professors were fully enrolled while the classes of the “sub-C” list professors were noticeably under enrolled.

The “sub-C” group decried the document as unfair, a popularity contest and threatened libel. They wanted “The List” banned from the campus. This posed an interesting dilemma for an institute championing the “free expression of ideas and information”.

This “situation” lasted for a few years until the university simply solved the “problem” by removing the names of which professors were teaching which courses in the class catalogs and then assigned professors to classes AFTER class lists were enrolled.

Fortunately, there isn’t a similar “www.ratemysubstituteteacher.com” site for me to worry about, but I DO sometimes wonder, though, where I might rank.

3 comments:

leesepea said...

Holy crap, I found my school!

Several of the teachers that are rated don't work at my school anymore. Thank gods I'm not on the list. I really don't want to know what my students think of me; I just want to know they're succeeding in my classes.

I'm sure you're a fine substitute. You get in there and get things done; what more could any teacher ask?

MommyProf said...

They have this for professors as well. Of course only the very disgruntled and the very gruntled bother posting...

Anonymous said...

I've found by reading the Rate My Teachers site that people generally rate those they love extremely well and those they hate very very low, so the comments seem to be very polarized. And whew, I'm not in there either. I checked. ;-)