A Little Perspective, Please

Posted on by Chad Orzel

I’ve linked to Inside Higher Ed almost every day this week, so why stop now? Today’s Views section features Terry Caesar being outraged over RateMyProfessors.com (which he refers to in BLOCK CAPS throughout). Among the many sins of the site, he includes this paragraph:

In fact, students at RATE don’t even have to be students! I know of one professor who was so angered at a comment made by one of her students that she took out a fake account, wrote a more favorable comment about herself, and then added more praise to the comments about two of her colleagues. How many other professors do this? There’s no telling — just as there’s no telling about local uses of the site by campus committees.

OK, I have to say something, here, and bear in mind that I say this as an assistant professor coming up for tenure in the fall: Get a fucking grip, people.

This is a site where students are blowing off steam. That’s it. Your tenure decision isn’t riding on your “hotness” score, and if by some fluke, your committee happens to look at it, you can rest assured that it will be treated with all the seriousness it deserves, which is to say damn little. It’s not worth perpetrating sock-puppetry to boost your scores, any more than it would be worth dressing up as a student and hanging out in the snack bar to offer “spontaneous” testimonials to your own excellence as a professor.

If you’re bothered by this sort of thing, don’t look at the site. It’s as simple as that. But if you must look, for God’s sake, try to keep a little perspective, will you?

12 thoughts on “A Little Perspective, Please”

  2. Chad, thanks for the voice of reason. I know of several colleagues who obsess about students going off on them on that site, and my reaction has always been, “So why do you look at it?”

    However, while I believe you are correct about tenure decisions and so on, at least at rational institutions, I should point out that not all of us work at such places. There is a rumor afoot where I teach that the Deans are consulting RMP and, sad to say, knowing what we officially know about the way they make decisions, this doesn’t sound totally like a paranoid fantasy. The rumor hints that it may only pertain to adjuncts, and in a way that is worse, as adjuncts have no job security and are excessively vulnerable to having their jobs taken away for nonsensical reasons (for example, in most departments they are never peer-evaluated, and the student evaluation form used here is particularly ill-designed).

    In a rational workplace this wouldn’t happen, but the vast majority of colleges in the US are under extreme pressure to become more “consumer-oriented.”

  3. The students do read it, though….

    I asked the students in my summer course if they’d read ratemyprofessor.com. A few of them nodded tenatively. I asked them if it made them more scared about taking my class. The few nodded more vigorously.

    ratemyprofessors.com should be ignored as silly venting (unless your deans are as boneheaded as Ned Henry’s — which, thinking about it, may not be so outlandish), as you say, except insofar as it may feed into the groupthink that goes on with students, where they all convince each other that they hate some professor without really thinking for themselves. It gives us one more hurdle to overcome when trying to convince our students to like us… and they have to like us, because by and large our “teaching ability” is (mis)judged by the administration based on student evaluations.

    -Rob

  4. Yes, Rob, I was going to add something like that but thought my comment was getting a bit long.

    There’s quite a bit of anecdotal evidence here that RMP is having an effect on which students enroll for which professors’ courses. Specifically hard-hit are the “tough but fair” types and the “make you work hard but you learn a lot” types. In the old days, a couple of years back, word of mouth amongst the students would eventually sort the ones who wanted what they were offering into their classes; that seems to have changed rather rapidly over a short period of time (now students avoid some whose classes used to fill up) and we suspect based, as I said, on anecdotes, that RMP replacing the old grapevine may be a factor. Down the line this could have a big impact on other things on which they are officially being evaluated.

  5. How about a RATE my Prof for Buffalo Bill Dembski?
    “What an insufferable, smarmy little prig”.
    “This guy doesn’t have a clue”
    “He’s a walking, talking wedgie waiting to happen”.
    Hotness Scale: “Can you have an infinate negative number?”

    If I were a Dembski student, that’s what I would submit!

  7. So, students doing what they always have done but more efficiently is now a problem?

    Unless rational counters to it become more efficient, yes.

  11. The problem is not with RMP, per se. It’s what it’s used for. Academic politics uses any tool at hand: derogatory statements, from wherever, will be used against you if someone wants to get at you.

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