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TeacherReviews.com Forced Offline
MrCawfee writes "Dylan Greene's site Teacher Reviews which allows students to post reviews of their professors. The site was taken down because a professor complained about comments made against him, and threatened to sue. Here is an exerpt from his blog: 'Yesterday and tonight I talked with a professor who was extremely upset with what written about him on TeacherReviews. He had several inappropriate reviews that made unfounded accusations and inappropriate untruthful remarks such as calling him "Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic."' You can read his blog here."
The problem is, a good system would allow exactly those kinds of comments. Slashdot, for example, allows you to post whatever you want, but you can get modded down and not be seen. A similar system would work for teacher reviews - if you want to read all of the "drivel" (per se) then go ahead.
Is this legal? I don't understand how user submitted reviews would get this site knocked offline. How is this any different from someone posting bad stuff about a teacher on a LiveJournal (or other blogging site) blog?
Scorta futuere amo!
tomorrow is a president vs. editorial reviews.
Maybe donate to the ACLU and EFF
to help them protect our freedom of speech online.
Cheers, Joel
This guy is a pussy and he's selling out if he thinks these changes would benefit his USER BASE (i.e. students) in any way. Professors get anonymous, private reviews every semester at most schools. What's the point of having another resource (TeacherReviews.com) tell the professor privately what his potential students want to know? Obviously libelous and false reviews should be removed from the site, or moderated before they even appear live. However, no professor should have the right to remove ALL reviews just because the reviewers didn't kiss his ass.
The Ezine Directory
Its amazing how much privacy some professors at public universities often feel they are entitled to have. I'm not saying all professors are like this, but some have this superiority attitude where they feel completely accountable to nobody. They don't want criticism of them or their classes made available to the student body. They don't want anyone making lecture notes available outside the classroom. They won't change aspects of their class that students and/or administrators dislike. And to top it off, they feel that material they develop on the university's dime is their own property. Someone needs to remind these jokers they are paid by public funding and student tuition, so they are accountable to both of those groups.
He had several inappropriate reviews that made unfounded accusations and inappropriate untruthful remarks such as calling him "Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic." These reviews should not have been on the site.
Okay, let me get this straight...
The professor threatened to sue, even after removal of the offensive posts, because someone called him paranoid?
Umm... Gee, Tweaky, you might want to lighten up on the coffee. That "paranoid" idea sounds all too appropriate... Most people would have brushed it off as a crack by some waste of flesh that couldn't pass the class, but no, Tweaky here had to have a valuable internet resource taken down.
If that doesn't count as paranoid...
There already is such a system.
It's called "grades."
And by default, you can see the review of the item that is most relevant.
How can this not apply to Teacher Reviews? If a review of the teacher is particularly bad, but gets voted as useful / accurate, then oh well.
Maybe reviews should be blammed Newgrounds Style, but with a few modifications. After a certain number of votes, if the review is found slanderous / not useful, it becomes invisible and flagged for review.
Also, why not instead of censor it, allow the actual teacher room to respond to his / her own review? If there are 200 upvotes on a negative review of the teacher, the teacher should have the right to defend his / her own philosophy.
Apparently this fellow doesn't care for his work *too* much. If he fought the good fight, I'm sure the ACLU et al would help foot the bill.
Thoughts? (I'd prefer responses over moderation on this one)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
As a psychologist, and an instructor at a university, I can sympathize with both (1) the students who want to evaluate potential courses, and (2) instructors who not only have to deal with problematic students, but sometimes are actually pressured to kiss their ass.
.5 who can't accept blame for the fact they failed all their classes because they didn't study for whatever reason. When those students begin to make false statements about professors, those statements should be scrutinized, because they affect the life of someone else.
Courses and professors are not simply to be rated and "consumed" based on how pleased you are with your performance in a class. That's not to say professors shouldn't be evaluated, but rather, that student ratings shouldn't be the primary means of doing so. There is a conflict of interest inherent in student ratings: students who perform poorly, who are required to take a class, etc. tend to rate professors lower than individuals who perform well or who are taking the course as an elective. This has nothing to do with the professor--it has everything to do with a student blaming a professor for their own performance problems.
There is a disturbing trend among universities, possibly fading, possibly not, to strive toward a product-consumer model, where students are the consumers, and the university is the producer. A more appropriate model to aim for is one in which both students and professors are seen as producers, and the university community is the consumer, so to speak. Students should go to a university to contribute, not to consume. The same should be said for professors.
Having said all this, I don't in general have a problem with a website, forum, or whatever, publishing student ratings of courses. Students talk about classes anyway, and these sorts of things just open up the flow of communication. I also see plenty of colleagues who can't teach a damn, and should probably be forced to reconsider the abuse they give to students.
If a student really did post something about a professor being a "paranoid schizophrenic," fine, but then someone should be held liable for, well, libel, because it's not a label that should be taken lightly (whoa--that's some sort of inchoate tongue-twister). As other posts have noted, there ARE young professors trying to get tenure, whose lives ARE affected by disgruntled students with a GPA of
I hope this website stays running, but I also hope that whoever runs it realizes that they need to be responsible for the things that appear on their website. If they put this stuff up, fine, but they should be prepared for lawsuits surrounding exactly these sorts of things. I also think that whoever visits these sorts of sites thinks long and hard about why they are seeking out this information, and why they are seeking an education.
There have been suggestions of moderated ratings and that sort of thing. It's not such a bad idea. Perhaps appropriate moderations should be done in exactly the same way that universities and professors are asked to consider ratings? E.g., that ratings be weighted lower if they are coming from individuals with lower GPAs, lower grades in the class, or if they are not taking the course as an elective? There would be problems in this in a non-university site, because you would have no way of verifying grades, but ideally, this is the way it could be done. Allow other professors to moderate them? Who knows. I guess it could be done.