Slashdot Mirror
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."
Once profs have tenure their incentive to teach better is dramatically reduced. If they can get more grants doing research with no chance of being fired for imcompentent teaching then you can believe the grants will come first.
This becomes especially easy if the students can't voice their discretions publically. I don't think a single university publically displays the stats of student reviews after a semester with a prof. The profs can complain all they want but in the long run it's the students who will suffer.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
I have some real sympathy for being able to "shop" online to get info about courses and teachers. But I'm a college prof myself, and have sat on a number of personnel committees, and have read a *lot* of student comments over the years. Many of those comments - perhaps most - are intelligent, or plausible, or reasonable expressions of feelings. Sometimes more than one of these. But sometimes they are simply irresponsible - 'get another career,' 'you shouldn't be allowed to teach anyone, anywere,'and sadly, a lot of 'you #@$$!, get #%&*$#.' Insults, psychiatric diagnoses, speculations about home life - these are rare, but not rare enough. It's bad enough that these go into personnel files and get read by peers and supervisors (yes, they really are, and they really matter). But at least these people understand what sorts of things, good and bad, students will say anonymously. Unmoderated posting of these things on the internet is a bad idea, personally damaging, and maybe harmful to careers.
I'm sympathetic to the prof, especially if he's new faculty. This could be the only exposure that his potential students get to him. A determined effort to slander his teaching ability -- when very people know him anyway -- could literally ruin his career, as tenure decisions are made in part on teaching ability.
I can't think of a scenario in which someone's career could be ruined by a Slashdot troll.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
IANAL. This is a personal opinion.
I don't think sites should be LIABLE for what people post, but because of the unique nature of the Internet, once something is posted on a site it's likely to stay there and be easily accessable, in ways past forms of communication weren't. That gives sites like Teacher Reviews, and even places like Slashdot, unique responsibility.
If I tell a friend that Mr. Example Teacher is an ass, word may or may not spread, and the comments may or may not be linked back to me. But it takes an active effort by many people for the comment to spread. And if it's not true, it will probably fizzle out. Even if it isn't true and does NOT fizzle out, rumors are very specific forms of communication that most people don't take serriously.
On the other hand, if I post a comment to Teacher Reviews, 30 seconds of my time has created something that may stay there for ever and ever. And, unlike rumors, there's no way for others to say, "I don't think this is true, but I heard that...." All the comments are posted as equals.
So I would say if something libelous is posted to a website, while the webmaster isn't responsible for the actual content, I would say they're responsible for removing it in a timely manner, once notified of the content.
Speaking of Teacher Reviews specifically, I think if a bad review of a teacher was posted (talks slow, bad assignments, boring) then Teacher Review does not have a responsibility to take it down. On the contrary, they have a responsibility to leave it up if they want to achieve their goals of a student-reviewed teacher database. But I would say labeling a teacher as a "Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic" could be considered libelous. I don't think it's unreasonable that it be asked to be removed.
Bringing it back to Slashdot...
This site is in a very odd position, in that much of the postings here (for example, about SCO or Microsoft) could easily be considered as libel. But unlike Teacher Reviews, they're (usually) posted as jokes. And Slashdot has a moderation system and a reply system so posts that are blatently untrue get shouted down by more accurate responses.
I'd say Teacher Reviews, unfortunatly, took the only realistic course of action. They took the site down, and are taking time to regroup. I'd be sad if some of the suggested implimentations actually happen (hiding teacher reviews from Google, or non anonymous reviews) but I think things like emailing professors reviews or having a better process for review removeall are very reasonable.
All in all, I hope Teacher Reviews is able to continue. It's a great site and a very nifty idea.
-Trillian
PS I didn't find a way to work it gracefully into my post, but I think the teacher who threatened to sue, even after the review was removied, is an ass. I'll risk the possibility of getting Slashdot sued, and go so far as to say he sounds like one of those crazy Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenics you've been hearing so much about recently....
Another decent teacher review site is RateMyProfessors.com - it's got moderation, to avoid issues like this; Bascially, the intent of the moderation is to remove libel (saying someone has a psychiatric condition on a whim without proof definately isn't legal...), but leave pretty much anything else that describes in some way the teacher and their class.
Schools already have the resources to provide information in a much more reliable way. All they have to do is take the end-of-course data that they share with the professor, and publish it. If they got an average of 1.34 out of 5, that's an irrefutable fact and therefore no libel charge can come of that.... and that's really all the students need to know.
Two points - The professor has no right to force a shutdown of the site, lawsuit threat or not. He can insist and plead, but short of an injunction (or the ISP taking the site down, as is their right), the host could keep his site up. The professor might not like what content was up there, but his remedy is against the AUTHOR of the statements, not the SITE. Second, this seems to me to be a case of the site getting a threat of suit and just caving in to the threat. Under 47 USC 230(c), the site would not be liable as an author of the posts, foreclosing suit against them. Given that, I would really like to see what legal grounds they have to stand on.
Disclaimer - The foregoing is only to be used for the purpose of discussion and should not be construed as legal advice related to any current or future problem, nor should it be relied upon by anyone without consulting a licensed attorney.
My anti college site is offline too - for the same reasons. The forums and content got too hot for the administration and they wanted to go to court. I did once - and won hands down - but I was still out the money. So, in the end they still win. Cause they have the tuition of thousands of students and I don't. There is no free speech in America anymore unless you are rich. Any one that tells you other wise is a liar, wrong or both.
Yes
and if this professor is so scared of negative reviews, perhaps he should review his arrogance quotient.
Does said professor seriously think that opinions about him don't get discussed between students in private discussions? Does he think he's immune to that? Does he think that his status makes him immune to being judged? Who the fuck does he think he is?
One of the problems in education nowadays is that bad teachers are *not* being reviewed they way they should be. The very fact that he resorted to a lawsuit against this website makes me think that there's probably a lot of truth to what was being said about him. I realize that he's busy ( I hope he is) but the proper response would have been to rebut the accusations against him, to defend himself against them, publicly (he's a public figure, after all).
I'm not putting it very well, but if he has someone critizing him in such a way as to damage his public reputation (if he *really* thinks those accusations are unwarranted) then the recourse is *not* suing the website (could just as well have been a magazine, or newspaper article) but to retaliate against them *publicly* in speech, not against a website that is simply offering another form of free speech.
Excuse me for not being completely coherent but I'm pretty damned mad, mostly because I wish forums like that had been available when I was in college. We had *plenty* of bad professors (mostly tenured).
Political Correctness and the "It's NOT FAIR" whine rears it's ugly head again. I can just imagine what some of my professors would have said about him. It wouldn't have been complimentory, that I can assure you.
What I can assure you of, is that the most common quote among the really good teachers I had, would have been Shakespeare. You know which one.
This one goes into my notes under "Decline and Fall of America".
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
The evaluations are presented as a series of statements, which the student ranks from 1 (bad) to 5 (good). They post the average rating for each statement, organized by course and/or instructor. The information is restricted to University affialiates, so heres an example of an evaluation summary for a random professor (name removed):
Course: Honors Calculus II, section xxx
Students Responded: 13
Students Enrolled : 19
Overall, this was an excellent course. 4.43 A-
Overall, the instructor was an excellent teacher. 4.85 A
I learned a great deal from this course. 4.31 A-
I had a strong desire to take this course. 3.60 B
The workload for this course was (5=LIGHT...1=HEAVY) 2.81 C
Students felt comfortable asking questions. 4.31 A-
Graded assignments reflected the material covered. 4.06 B+
The grades in this course were fairly determined 4.30 A-
Students' difficulty with the material was recognized. 3.67 B
My expected grade in this course is (5=A...1=E) 4.21 A-
The course requirements were clearly defined. 4.25 A-
The instructor presented material clearly in lectures/discussions. 4.69 A
Generally speaking, students are fair with the evaluations (unless the prof is just awful...) - I really like that they ask several questions about the professor and the course (rather than simply "How was the professor? 1-5"; it helps to make more objective decisions about the course and the professor. The questions depend on the department (Elec. Engin. and Comp. Sci. has 20-30 evaluation statments for some courses).
Oddly enough, the worst professor I've ever had told us that 'we didn't need to come to class' for one of the last days of the course. Turns out he gave out evaluations that day, and very few people were in class. The next term, somebody checked the evaluation stats for the class, and saw that while there were only a few people in class that day, 100+ students responded with evaluations (with VERY high ratings). He told the department, and an investigation revealted that the professor filled out the forms himself (with very high ratings, of course). He was promptly fired. Sweet, sweet revenge :-p
Along these same lines they could implement a peer review process for review submissions. A new user's review could be kept in limbo until, say, 10 other reviews (perhaps once they reach a certain level of "trust") have given the ok to it. Effectively these Trusted Reviewers would act like moderators and weed out the intentionally inflamitory reviews, spam, or poorly written reviews from the well-written and on-topic reviews. The anti-spam project Razor uses something similar to this called the Truth Evaluation System or TeS. It's all done automaticly, using spam reports and revokes to ascertain what a registered user's confidence level should be.
Why can't something like this be implemented to solve their problem? It still doesn't prevent a person from commiting libel but it does help weed out the intentionally imflamitory reviews and blatent personal attacks on educators. I've often commented on how I think such a review system should be used on Slashdot for the moderation system. I think all negative-scoring reviews should be confirmed by a second moderator before the post is scored. This would be best accomplished by not penalizing the moderator for participating in the confirmation process by losing a moderator point.
The most significant failing of the metamoderation system on Slashdot is related to the fact that the metamoderators don't or can't verify the accuracy of a moderation. A link to goatse disguised as a mirror of the article could well be moderated "informative", and a metamoderator would not necessarily bother to check that the link actually was informative.
However, in the hypothetical situation I presented, all metamoderators would be able to directly attest to the accuracy of the "moderation" (the review). Therefore, the only major failing of the described system would be people consciously describing inaccurate reviews as accurate, and these people would (hopefully) be statistically insignificant.
For example, I have a profile on ratemyprofessor.com , which is something similar to this site. I was reading the comments, and they were somewhat amusing. For example, one of my reviews said that I spoke so well I should be elected the prime minister of the UK. (Keep in mind that I'm an American teaching at a US university, so this is clearly facetious.) There were a lot of more reviews which were clearly put there for the purposes of humor. Some were serious, but there's no way to know.
The real problem with these types of sites is that anyone on Earth can write a review. At least with the official evaluations at the end of the semester, you need to be in the class to give input. This can be written by any random crank. I cannot stress enough that any information you get on a site like this is useless, because it can be written by anyone.
Furthermore, a lot of students give really high marks to easy professors because it is easy to get an A. I know that I didn't, because I am a hard-ass. On the other hand, if you just want an easy A, I certainly don't want you in my class. So maybe this will select out some people I don't want. Again, though, if you want to learn something, you don't want the easy guy.
All in all, deciding which professor to take based on a site like this is like deciding whom to vote for based on a Slashdot poll. And for exactly the same reason. It's probably better than reading tea leaves, but not much.
Now, as far as this professor goes, I don't know why he would get bent out of shape. At the end of the day, very few professors care at all what the students think, and for those that care at all, don't care much. I don't know why he gives two fucks what is on some random site.
I can say for myself that I have gotten some good feedback from evaluations and I have tried to incorporate suggestions into my teaching style. But this is a rare event. More than 99% of student feedback I have received is completely useless and was a waste of time, most typically it's someone with an axe to grind.
And I think a lot of students fool themselves into thinking that this feedback will actually matter in the long run. Let me put it this way: it is almost inconceivable that student evaluations can affect a professor's life. If he is tenured, then the probability is exactly 0. If he is tenure-track, then only if his research is borderline will these kinds of evaluations come into play, but I would say that this plays a role in fewer than 1 out of 1000 cases. Again, like I said, if you want to give constructive critism to a professor that you think might take it to heart, give it a shot. But I have seen tons of "axe-grinding" evaluations, even of me, and I can state unequivocally that they are a waste of graphite.
And by the way, the reason for this is simple. If you're at a good school, the school isn't good because you, the undergrad, is there. You are there because the school is good, and the school is good because the international reputation of the research is strong. Research is what matters. End of story.
Come on, give it up, that's