While end of the semester evaluations can help professors gauge the success of their teaching style, they’ve denied students the chance to rate the difficulty or hotness of their instructors.
Recently, professor-evaluation Web sites have given students an outlet for these thoughts, but professors haven’t found them quite as helpful.
Class evaluations allow professors to know what did and didn’t work in their class and can be important parts of their merit and tenure evaluations, said Jordan Stump, a French professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, so they’re taken very seriously.
While evaluations using numbers to rank a professor’s performance may be easier for students, Stump said he prefers written, short-answer evaluations allowing students to more fully express their opinions.
“Most of the time I find students say their grievances, and I’m extremely conscious of that, and it changes the way I teach,” he said.
But over the last few years, independently run Web sites such as ratemyprofessors.com have given students another outlet to evaluate their teachers.
These sites allow students to anonymously evaluate the helpfulness, degree of ease and, in some cases, hotness of their professors, as well as post short comments.
Stump said he’s looked at online ratings sites a few times, but he doesn’t think many professors find them too helpful in evaluating their performance.
“They’re always interesting,” Stump said. “They’re like so many things on the Internet in that there’s a chance that they may be useful and a strong chance they won’t be. Like rating hotness? I don’t see how that’s too helpful to professors.”
Derek Smith, a junior general studies major, said he’s never posted anything on these sites, but he has used them to decide what professors he should take classes from.
Using feedback to decide if they should take a class from a particular professor is the main reason students check these sites, Stump said, but they don’t have many benefits for professors.
“They allow students to vent, which is nice,” Stump said. “But I think helping professors is pretty low down on the list of what they try to do.”
The fact that students seek out the evaluation sites means they’re more likely to be honest, Smith said, unlike in-class evaluations students are forced to take.
“I think, when it’s something you’re forced to do in class, you’re less likely to be truthful than something you do voluntarily,” Smith said.
About half the students that fill out in-class evaluations take them fairly seriously, Stump said, and he’s found that most students give their honest opinion about the class.
“Students are very open about the things they don’t like, and that’s the most interesting part,” Stump said.
While evaluation sites can provide entertainment and a place for students to vent, Stump said the lack of detail means he and most other professors don’t see them as a serious source for performance feedback.
“I count the evaluation I know were done in class far more than something that could be done by anybody,” he said.
adamziegler@dailynebraskan.com
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