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."

Comments

Schools

[Anonymous Coward]

Some schools endorsed this. If you google, some schools even link to it

Re:Schools

[Trillian_1138]

Where is the link to it from that school webpage? I'm not trying to be difficult, just honestly can't find it....

-Trillian

PS Would also like to use this as an opportunity to complain that their site didn't render correctly in Mozilla. Just me, or anyone else have this problem?

Re:Schools

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:Schools

[Anonymous Coward]

University of Texas already does this, it allows students and professors to view these end-of-semester surveys with numerical data for all categories. link

Re:Schools

[autechre]

I would have to disagree. Sometimes, students will rate a professor lower because they felt the professor made the course too challenging (or not challenging enough). Certain people would find one of those an advantage rather than a downside. However, there are some teachers who are vague, wrong, incompetant, teach using very ineffective methods, are impossible to understand, rude, refuse to meet with you, grade seemingly randomly, etc. It can take much longer than necessary to get rid of a problem professor, and until then, it's helpful for students to see why they got a low rating.

If a teacher is rated highly by students for handing out A's without teaching much, and I actually want to learn the subject, I don't want that teacher. The numbers aren't always enough.

Re:Schools

[Boing]

The numbers aren't always enough.

Well then, the responsibility lies with the reader to look at the information for what it really is: a collection of opinions without full context, rather than a factual, discrete rating of the instructor.

It would actually be pretty neat if we could standardize the instructor review systems in a manner similar to amazon's book reviews... when you're rating the professor, you could submit a verbal review (anonymously, of course). Later, the students of that professor could read the reviews, and meta-moderate them by indicating how relevant and/or accurate each review was. The reviews presented publicly would then present real contextual information, as well as being accountable.

Re:Schools

[Fiz Ocelot]

At my university we review each professor near the end of the semester. They are totally anonymous and the prof won't see them until all grades have been turned in. It would be great if some of the info derived from these reviews would be made public. I've found teacher review sites to be very helpful in class selection, not to find the "easy prof" but in finding the really good ones.

Re:Schools

[Ubergrendle]

I agree with all of your comments, but that still does not mean that a quantitative measurement scale could not be devised. You can create a number of categories, which provide a range of opinions on various matters.

e.g. "Would you take this course again?" (out of ten)
10 out of 10 ("Hell yeah, 80% for no work!")

vs "How would you rate the professor's attitude torwards his students?"
3 out of 10 ("He was always late, abusive, but he still gave out great marks!!!")

Re:Schools

[Anonymous Coward]

If a teacher is rated highly by students for handing out A's without teaching much, and I actually want to learn the subject, I don't want that teacher. The numbers aren't always enough

Actually, from my experience most teachers that don't teach and hand out A's don't get high marks from the students. By the time students reach college most students really want to get the education they paid for. The students that just want to skate are in the minority by college. When someone chooses a major and decides what they want to do for a living, they expect good teachers.

Re:Schools

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you have never taken one of these end of course surveys.

There are many questions covering the different areas that make a class good -- teacher, materials,etc.

One of the questions is:

Did you feel the class was too challenging?

[] Strongly Agree
[] Somewhat Agree ...
[] Strongly Disagree

There is even an opportunity to write page long piece on anything you want.

This is what should be published. If one student trashes a teacher it shouldn't matter too much if a median average scoring method is used.

Re:Schools

[taped2thedesk]

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.

I go to the University of Michigan - at the end of each term, we are asked to fill out scantron course evaluations on the last day of class (the format is similar to what the poster described). This data is used for a variety of purposes, including tenure evaulations. The data is also tabulated and posted for making your course selections. They use a variety of questions to help students make a good decision.

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

Re:Schools

[geekoid]

" It can take much longer than necessary to get rid of a problem professor..."

I'm thinking duct tape and a trunk.

Re:Schools

[UndercoverParrothead]

Something similar exists for the students of the University of Maryland.

Terp Underground isn't officially sanctioned by the University, but it's fairly good at providing reviews of professors and courses.

Trouble is, doesn't seem like many of the newer students are using it, so the info is becoming out of date as professors/courses change.

Re:Schools

[hendridm]

> All they have to do is take the end-of-course data that they share with the professor, and publish it.

Right. That's "all they would have to do", but they don't, which is why sites like TeacherReviews.com came to be. As a former student, it was nice to know which profs were hard-asses and which were not. The fact that this guy is threatening to sue this site just reinforces how much of an asshole he/she is. I'm sure there was a reason several people posted negative comments.

Re:Schools

[Boing]

That was phrased kind of trollishly, but it's an important concern. The important distinction between my idea and slashdot is that the people meta-moderating a review would only be the students of the reviewed instructor.

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.

Re:Schools

[Pxtl]

There is never a category for "does the prof speak english?". That one needs to be there at my school.

Re:Schools

[Wavicle]

The information is restricted to University affialiates, so heres an example of an evaluation summary for a random professor (name removed):

Your random pick turned out a poor example:

Course: Honors Calculus II, section xxx

Your random selection turned up a rank-and-file class that is selectively taken above-average students. You are going to pick up almost exclusively outliers of the desired population.

The workload for this course was (5=LIGHT...1=HEAVY) 2.81 C

Either the students are definitely outliers and think several hours of homework a night isn't bad or the professor was easy going. Calc II is usually a course covering methods and applications of integration. It's the course when such fun things as integration by partial fraction decomposition - an almost universally hated subject - are explored. Getting the hang of integration generally requires doing lots and lots of integrals and appropriately the course workload should be fairly high.

My expected grade in this course is (5=A...1=E) 4.21 A-

Wow! Do A's grow on trees at umich?

Students typically give evaluations whose numbers directly correspond to their grade. Professors who give out A's like they're cheap hard candy on average receive higher marks even if their students tend to learn less.

This is particularly true of general ed. classes. I'd rather take a humanities course from someone who is an interesting lecturer and gives out high marks cheaply than from someone who is an interesting lecturer but requires 5,000 words of critical thinking essays which require mastery of the material to write.

While I think it is interesting to hear the professor's passion for the subject, I have a lot of other courses in line with my major that I need to give the bulk of my attention to. I'd rather not risk my GPA on a humanities course. I enter notes into the school's unofficial professor rating web site whether or not a particular professor is good for getting an easy A in.

Re:Schools

[taped2thedesk]

Your random selection turned up a rank-and-file class that is selectively taken above-average students. You are going to pick up almost exclusively outliers of the desired population.
It wasn't exactly random; I just tried to pick a course with a good mix of questions and responses. Each department uses their own set of questions, and some only have a few basic ones. The math department was the first one I clicked on. tried to find a section with a variety of marks, this was the first one I found after 2 or 3 tries. I wasn't trying to make a point with the actual data - just trying to show what information was provided.

Wow! Do A's grow on trees at umich? Well, generally speaking students in this class are way above average in math (generally there are a few hundred taking the 'regular' Calc II class, and about 40 students total took the honors class). Also, this is the estimated grade, so in this case I think it's a class of freshman that haven't found out that they won't get straight A's in college (for the most part). From experience, I can tell you A's don't exist at umich, especially in the math department... :-/ The actual average grade in the honors section was about a 3.3(B+), while in the 'regular' sections of calc 2, the average grade was about a 2.7(C+)

Either the students are definitely outliers and think several hours of homework a night isn't bad or the professor was easy going.
Students typically give evaluations whose numbers directly correspond to their grade. Professors who give out A's like they're cheap hard candy on average receive higher marks even if their students tend to learn less. Well yeah, of course they do. That's why the multiple ratings are helpful. If the average workload is a 5 (light), then chances are the prof got a good rating because of that. If the workload was a 3, then the prof ratings mean a lot more to me. If they just said "Math xxx section xxx with prof xxx got a 4.2 rating", that would mean nothing to me.

I do have a professor that always ranks very high on evaluations, yet assigns much more work than other profs do, and makes the classes a lot more difficult. He's a great prof, and the extra work actually translates into better understanding of the subject/doesn't assign work just for the sake of assigning work. Obviously this isn't always the case though.

Making decisions based solely on these ratings isn't a great idea - you can get a lot more insight by talking to other students that have taken classes in that section before. The course evals are a great place to start, and are a good source of advice if you don't know anyone who has had that professor before.

Re:Schools

[Negatyfus]

Actually, this Slashdot article is kinda useless. If you read the article, it says the professor dropped the case and is not negotiating changes to the site with the professor to improve it. Part of the enhancements is a system in which users can flag reviews for deletetion, upon volunteers can then check it and permanently remove it.

Re:Schools

[The Limp Devil]

Well then, the responsibility lies with the reader to look at the information for what it really is: a collection of opinions without full context, rather than a factual, discrete rating of the instructor.

Come one, do you really believe that 18 year old students are mature enough to do that? Then you go to a very different university than I did! Maybe they could do that after a couple of years as students, but certainly not at first.

Re:Schools

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, what you're describing is similar to what goes on at my college. At the end of each class, we must fill out a fairly detailed form with spaces to describe what we expected to get out of the class, what we actually got out of the class, whether the teaching methods of the teacher were effective, etc. Basically it's a time to tell how your teacher performed and to own up to how you performed in class. And usually, if it's a bad teacher, there's a pretty clear link between the two. This form, which is filled out without the teacher present, can be signed or unsigned and is then taken by a student to the departmental office. It's reviewed by the Provost and folks in their office, then by the departmental heads, and then is giving back to the professor. This system works amazingly well, and I think it gives the students a chance to change who is hired again. The one fault is that it doesn't affect tenured faculty as much, but a good tenured professor still needs the student commentary to learn to teach more effectively.

But here's one thing to consider: kids talk. Kids of all ages and in all types of schools talk about their teachers and who sucks and who doesn't. And you can usually tell when someone's a slacker and just wants to get an easy A. Trust me, if the kid asks for Mrs. Soandso and the kid is a slacker, the teacher is a slacker too.

Re:Schools

[kraada]

I was the Course Evaluation Guide editor for Brandeis University a couple of years ago, so I got to read all of the comments left by the students for their teachers. In general comments were definitely more positive in departments where grades were higher, but I do believe that you can still get accurate results if you have a decently worded questionnaire. Also, the handwritten section generally made it clear what the students enjoyed and didn't enjoy out of the class.

From some 2000 classes, I rarely had times where there was nothing negative, or nothing positive. It was very clear, though, which professors were significantly worse in the eyes of the students. When 10-20% of the class expresses very vehement negative opinions of the professor and the rest seem lukewarm at best, it's pretty clear that the professor needs some help (As an aside, Brandeis' forms are handwritten, so many students are, rightly, afraid that their professors will recognize their handwriting and change their comments appropriately. It is even more telling when students will write extremely negative things despite this fact.).

So after having read some 15 or 20 thousand reviews, I think I can say that while there is definite work that can be done to improve the entire system, the system is, at its base, solid.

My biggest changes to the system would be:

1. Make the reviews online and anonymous. The numbers should always stay publically available.
2. Introduce some form of real accountability for professors. Not necessarily for each individual class, but if a professor receives marks below X for (we'll say) 4-6 classes running, there is probably something severely wrong.
3. Make sure students know that the forms are used for something. Many people asked me what was the real results of the evaluations, and other than helping pick out awards recepients, and generally informing students, there isn't much that they're used for (at least at Brandeis).

Of course, it's always hard to push change through on the university level, which is why I was so glad to see such review websites, and I'm saddened to see this one go.

Re:Schools

[Tassach]

[D]o you really believe that 18 year old students are mature enough to [look at the information for what it really is]?

They should be. An 18 y/o is legally an adult; they are supposed mature enough to exercise the rights and duties of citizenship: vote, serve in the military, get married, enter into contracts, and so forth. Furthermore, we're talking about college students, who are a group of people who are supposed to have already mastered basic intellectual skills like reading comprehension.

Call me old fashioned, but I don't think that a student who needs remedial instruction, either in his or her native language or in basic math, should be admitted into a degree program, nor should remedial coursework count towords graduation. The fact that so many high-school graduates are unprepared for college is a pretty scathing indictment of our educational system(*).

(*) Note to parents: you are part of the educational system. Schools and teachers exist to help you educate your children, not to educate them for you. Sending your kids off to school does not relieve you of your personal duty to raise your children.

Re:Schools

[SharkJumper]

It would actually be pretty neat if we could standardize the instructor review systems in a manner similar to amazon's book reviews..

Or like Ebay's buyer/seller reviews, thus giving the teacher a nice opportunity to respond.

Student: Test wasn't shipped on time. Professor never explained my low grade. Don't purchase education from this professor!!!!! FFFFFFFFFF-------!!!

Professor: Student was late to class and never returned emails. Never received payment. Responsibility for education rests on student!!!!!!!

SharkJumper

Re:Schools

[JLyle]

If you read the article, it says the professor dropped the case and is not negotiating changes to the site with the professor to improve it.

Just wanted to clarify that the parent poster (presumably) meant to write "... is now negotiating changes to the site...".

Re:Schools

[Rich0]

I personally know of a case where this happened. The person in question was a department head, and he had the reviews temporarily stored in his office. Let's call this guy Fred.

Everyone in his class hated him, they gave him almost exclusively 1's and 2's (on the 1-5 scale - 1 being bad). Then they looked at the stats published in the library the next semester, and saw all 3-5's, with NO 1-2's.

That was just DUMB on his part. If he had put at least one 1 and one 2 in the falsified evals for each category, then if somebody looked at the results on their own, they might have assumed that they were the only one who gave such a low rating. By having zero 1's and 2's, anybody in the class could see that something was wrong without the need to conspire.

The class quickly did get together and found that the ratings were universally horrible. This got escalated to the dean and very quickly created a sticky situation. Fred was up for tenure, and was given the opportunity to resign, which he took (I guess he is now at another university).

I was the ed-in-chief of the college newspaper at the time, and I knew most of the people personally and was present for one meeting with the dean - this is a true story.

I wasn't sad to see Fred go - he reamed me out for cutting through his physics lab to get to another chemistry lab (which in fact could only be accessed by going through either his lab or somebody else's). Fortunately, the acting chemistry department head (who I worked for at the time) walked in - he was himself cutting through to get to the other lab. Fred proceeded to start reaming him out, at which point I ducked and ran for the door. Suffice it to say that at my college the chem dept had a LOT more clout than the math dept, and Fred was brand new and the acting chem dept head was well-liked and had been around for a while. I don't think that Fred started off on the right foot - several chem dept faculty were on his tenure committee and were quite interested when they heard about the evaluations incident.

So, yes, this stuff happens. And yes, when it happens the college is very interested in it. And yes, the reason they are interested in it is becase they want to keep it quiet. So yes, when these situations are handled it gets buried. In fact, Fred was threatening lawsuits, which is probably why the college just let him resign without disgrace.

I'm sorry that now some other class had to deal with him since it was covered up. However, he probably isn't around any more - he was a horrible teacher and sooner or later somebody will start wondering why he moves around every three years...

Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[a.koepke]

What happened to TeacherReviews?

TeacherReviews.com is free site I run for students which lets students share opinions of professors with other students. I have been pressured to shut it down. I'm not sure if it will be down forever or just a short amount of time until some changes are made. Please read on to find out why and what I am going to do about it.

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." These reviews should not have been on the site.

I immediately deleted this professor's reviews, as I always do those rare times that a professor complains. He still threatened to sue - and even threatened to get the involvement of the teacher's union American Federation of Teachers. A lawsuit is not something I have the time or money to be involved in, no matter how confident I am that the courts would side in the favor of free speech and the site.

This would be the first lawsuit against TeacherReviews, however TeacherReview, the precursor site to TeacherReviews had one lawsuit against in about four years ago. TeacherReview had a "no review is ever deleted" policy. The ACLU helped defend TeacherReview, and TeacherReview achieved a victory - the two professors involved settled just days before the San Francisco Superior Court hearing .

The purpose of Teacher Reviews has always been to help students find the best professors to take, however the quality and reliability of TeacherReviews has been diminished by the few users who have used the site to write insults, accusations, remarks that can be considered slanderous.

As I find about about these reviews, I always delete them. They no have merit, are not helpful to anyone, and are obviously the product of a bored student who just wants to harm the reputation of a professor. That is not the purpose of TeacherReviews.

There are over 36,000 reviews on the site - far too many for me to read and evaluate. Because of this, and the threat of lawsuit, I have elected to take down TeacherReviews.com for now - at least until I can make some needed changes to how the site works.

Here are some of the changes I hope to put in place:

* Instant review removal. As a rule, I have always removed reviews upon a professor's request. Today the system is manual and it is not obvious enough how it works. The new system will have a link for removing reviews next to every review. Anybody will be able to instantly remove inappropriate reviews. Some friends and I will evaluate these removed reviews.
* Easy professor removal. I believe professors should have the right to make their reviews be private. A professor will have the ability to hide all reviews from public view. Reviews posted will be emailed to that professor, but not shared with the rest of the world. The number of reviews and possibility other information will remain on the site.
* Hide Reviews from Google. One of the complaints I got from a the professor was that if you searched Google for his name, his reviews would show up pretty high in the list of found items. Normally this is a good thing, but if the reviews are inappropriate, then it is not approbate for the to be showing up in Google.
* Email notification of New Reviews. Professors should not have to regularly visit TeacherReviews to see if they have new reviews posted. This feature will give them the option of receiving email when new reviews are posted. Students will be able to use this feature as well. New reviews will also be available via RSS.
* Date-separated reviews. Today reviews that are two years old and older are listed along side of recent reviews. Since people change, I believe that these older reviews need to be identified as older reviews, and be put on a separate page.

These features I'm not sure about:

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[omarius]

"Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel."
--J. Jonah Jameson

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[z01d]

...and I appreciate any comments you have,...

He mean "sue", right?

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[ryanjensen]

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.

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[gcaseye6677]

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.

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

And it's only either if its not true.

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[pla]

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...

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[Txiasaeia]

As a student I want to agree with you, but as I'm wanting to become a prof someday, I'm not sure how far I'll go to do so. *some* profs don't feel accountable to anybody. *some* don't like criticism. Yeah, maybe you're right, but you're also wrong. Generalisations aren't going to help your argument.

HOWEVER, as to the "material they develop on the university's dime is their own property," I'm definitely going to have to disagree with you here. What do you consider to be "on the university's dime"? What do you consider "material"? If they make up course notes for a course that they're teaching, I think that they own them, and that students don't have an absolute right to possess them. I also think that if a prof writes a book, they should get the profits from it.

You may not realise this, but most profs are still active in their field, and tend to publish a few papers every year; are you really saying that the University should own these papers, and not the profs, simply because they're employed? /. had a discussion about this a couple days ago about IP and programmers; why is it different for professors (or any of the "intelligencia")?

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[shadowbearer]

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

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[DrEasy]

Those prof ratings can be pretty cruel and unfair. Yes, it's true that profs must have a thick skin to do their job, but still imagine being insulted on a public forum, and knowing that all your present and future students have access to that site, and that they can form a prejudice before even getting to know the prof.

How about starting RateTheStudents.com ? Would you like being publicly called a cheat or an incompetent lazy weasel (for good reason or not)? Would you like the profs to consult such a site before they start marking the final exam? I thought not.

Yes, that prof might have overreacted, but there's only that much abuse anyone can take. Who knows what else is going on in his life/job, maybe that was the last straw.

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[br0ck]

According to Dylan Greene's blog, THE LAWSUIT HAS BEEN DROPPED

TeacherReviews.com is coming back, and it's going to be better than ever - for both students and professors.

The professor who threatened a lawsuit has decided to drop the case. This happened after we talked about the situation, the site as it is today, and the intent of the site, which has always been to help students, as opposed to insult professors. This professor is now helping the site by providing feedback to the new features from a professor's point of view, which is something I have not looked into before.

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[Captain Beefheart]

Actually, you have to prove that the statement is false; prove that it was intended to cause harm; and prove that the statement in fact inflicted harm that was directly responsible for noticeable damage to the recipient's reputation and/or finances. I am not a lawyer.

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[magores]

mostly because I wish forums like that had been available when I was in college

When I was in college we had to actually TALK to other people that shared our major.

None of this forums stuff!

We had to seek out people that had gone before us! We talked to real people and asked real questions!

It was hard, and we LIKED it that way!


PS... I think I might have actually learned something at the same time.

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[m00nun1t]

I also think that if a prof writes a book, they should get the profits from it.

Yes, and it will be reviewed on Amazon.com (and other places as well), if it's bad, users will be forthcoming in saying so. The teacherreviews is (or should be) about their performance as a professor. In much the same way I might ask a friend to recommend an accountant, teacherreviews helps me choose a college/course to attend.

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[Draknor]

Very interesting post - it's easy to miss the other side of the argument sometimes, isn't it?

I think the intent of the website creator, in taking down the site, is a good-faith effort to make it a little less abusive. Personally, I disagree with his decision to allow profs to make reviews private; instead, I think it would be better to have a feature allowing a prof's response to a particular review.

Funny how a lot of things all boil down to similar principles, isn't it? How to balance the rights & the privacy of the many against the evil intentions of the few?

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[CGP314]

How about starting RateTheStudents.com ? Would you like being publicly called a cheat or an incompetent lazy weasel (for good reason or not)? Would you like the profs to consult such a site before they start marking the final exam? I thought not.

The difference is the professor is (potentially) providing a service that I am paying for. It is not the reverse with the students.

-Colin

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[Monkeyman334]

How about starting RateTheStudents.com ?

What? Like a transcript?

Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted

[gad_zuki!]

>How about starting RateTheStudents.com ?

Sorry but students are not the public figures that professors are. Often professors sign their name with their phd and the school they teach at to get extra clout in letters to the editor, the political process, are considered experts and testify in court, etc. Students have none of these powers of "celebrity."

A professor in social sciences can nominate anyone for a Nobel Peace Prize, can a student say the same?

In the end being a professor is a very, very public job and criticism of a public figure is nothing new, its just acadamia has yet to catch up with the real social changes the information revolution is bringing.

On top of this, professors are given web space by the universities they work for and can give a rebuttal that is easy to find with any search engine and it costs them nothing in hosting fees.

>Yes, that prof might have overreacted, but there's only that much abuse anyone can take

Then perhaps a job in the private sector is best for him. People make these lame apologies for politicians too. If its too hot in the kitchen...

Problem is...

[centralizati0n]

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.

Re:Problem is...

[s20451]

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.

Re:Problem is...

[LostCluster]

Libel at -1 can still attract a lawsuit. And /., for its part, will immediately respond by standing up and... telling them the IP address the post came from, and that, coupled with the timestamp, equates to an ISP account somewhere.

Re:Problem is...

[NeoSkandranon]

If he's a horrible enough teacher that he warrants consistent bad comments then perhaps tenure shouldn't even be what his superiors are considering

Re:Problem is...

[s20451]

How do you know the comments are accurate?

To say someone is schizophrenic when you are not an expert in the field is libelous, in any case.

Re:Problem is...

[modecx]

But you can say "It is my opinion (from experience) that professor Such and Such is a schizophrenic manic depressive wackjob", and get away with it, no?

Iv'e had professors like this (that even fit my prior description); even the staff knew they were off their rocker. Luckily, they were all reasonable people (for the most part), and they were even brilliant--even though they were loonier than a pair of Mexican jumping beans on a hot tin roof. I would have appreciated knowing this beforehand, and probably would have taken the courses with those professors anyway.

If this guy really is a nutball, or even eccentric, then people should know it.

Of course, I can't have had any experience with this nutjob of a professor. Likewise, neither could the operator of a teacher review site have enough experience with the thousands of professors nationwide to say anything positive or negative about any given professor.

Obviously, there needs to be an accountability system, whereby the person whom entered the review can be tracked. Or something. I dunno.

Re:Problem is...

[LordHunter317]

No, its only libelous if you are attempting to use the statements to damage a person's reputation or character. That's why its nearly impossible to win a slander or libel case in the USA -- unless the person slips up and writes down that they're intentionally damaging someone's character, you have no proof that'll hold up in court.

Now in the rest of the world, the standard is much different.

Re:Problem is...

[Misch]

The biggest problem I have with professors evaluation forms is that they only go to the students who complete the class. Students that withdraw (at least at my former college) don't get to evaluate the professor. I think that getting input from the students who withdraw from classes is just as important as those who stay through the course.

Re:Problem is...

[droleary]

To say someone is schizophrenic when you are not an expert in the field is libelous, in any case.

This is a good example of why the system is screwed up. The way it should be is that if you are not an expert in the field (of psychology) then it cannot be libel. In that case, you're just a guy stating your opinion and not a medical professional giving a diagnosis. What's next, I need to be a proctologist to claim the President has his head up his ass, and then I can only do so with with the x-ray as evidence?

Re:Problem is...

[bcrowell]

I'm a physics professor (now tenured). A lot of the students at my school used this site until recently. I didn't realize until today that this site, just like TeacherReviews, is being shut down because of threats of lawsuits.

I think it's a shame that these sites are so vulnerable to this kind of legal abuse. I also take music courses at my school, so I'm both a teacher and a student at the same time. I've posted reviews of my music teachers, because I thought the site was a good idea.

Switching back to my other hat as a teacher, it was always interesting to see the contrast between the whototake.com comments on me and the comments students would write when they were formally surveyed at the end of the semester. The online reviews seemed to be self-selected: AFAICT, only the most disgruntled 10% of the class would ever bother to post there.

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.
Well, no, because (a) the tenure decision would be made based on the surveys administered formally by the school; (b) research-oriented schools only pay lip service to teaching as an important component of the tenure decision; (c) tenure committees are made up of faculty memers, who realize that disgruntled students are generally disgruntled because they wanted an easy A and didn't get it.

I have to admit to being a little cynical about the whole thing. Some students make good comments that really help me improve my teaching, but many just can't believe that they're really expected to put in 2 hours a week outside of class for every unit they're taking. Many of them write comments that just show totally unrealistic expectations, e.g., they complain that I won't let their whole lab group turn in a single lab report for a grade.

It was also funny reading some of the things students posted on whototake.com about other teachers: DR SMITH SUCKS BIGTIME!! SHE THE FUCKIN WORST ENGLISH TEECHUR IN THE WORLD! WHAT A BITCH!!!! I TOOK ENGLISH 1 FROM HER. AND I HAD TO DROP! CUZ, SHE THINK WE GOT NOTHING TO DO BUT READ BORRING BOOKS. N RIGHT PAPERS N SHIT.

Re:Problem is...

[rfovell]

Good points.

At my university, we also have a prof rating website (www.bruinwalk.com/professors/). The reviewers do indeed tend to be self-selected, tho on our boards, the top segment of the class also (thankfully) seems motivated to post. However, the biggest difference may be that the online reviews tend to be posted after the course grade is known. That can have unintended consequences.

As a professor myself, I have had mixed feelings about this board. However, some recent changes, and also this slashdot discussion, have encouraged me to look at our site more favorably. Those are:

* The site now shows distributions of scores, instead of just listing average stats. The frequency distribution can be most illuminating.
* A poor review, coupled with a "s/he's too hard!!" complaint can have a most salutary effect on the composition of your next class :-)
* Compared to what I've seen on other sites, the student comments on my school's site -- even and especially the negative ones -- appear to be quite mature. Sure, there are a few childish and transparent ones, but they're the exception (and, besides, likely to have the opposite of the intended effect).

Certainly, there is no universally perfect teacher or class. I think all anyone can ask is that posters be honest in their comments. I've read hundreds and hundreds of student comments (not only my own, but also in committee work), and I have to say that I am pretty impressed with the students' candor.

Re:Problem is...

[modecx]

Nor am I a psychiatrist, but I have had quite a lot of contact with mentally different-and ill people. I grew up with several such people; my grandmother was a contractor to a local mental hospital to give outside care.

Really, most schizophrenics are not that extraordinarily weird. It's a poorly understood disorder. Most schizophrenics are what you'd classify as shy (or to the extreme--reclusive). They have a hard time with their emotions, and aren't comfortable in large groups, have disorganized speech and thought patterns. Schizophrenia IS NOT mutiple personality disorder, mind you.

Not all schizophrenics have wild hallucinations, but most do have a vivid imagination, and that can keep them occupied. When they're staring off into space, they're in their own world. Sometimes it's difficult to get them out, and they don't respond to communication, or say something that has nothing to do with anything. They're just concentrating on something in there. I imagine that you'd be amazed at what's going on inside of their mind sometimes, if only they had the capacity to reliably communicate it.

Paranoid schizophrenics you gotta watch out for, though. They're far more likely to do strange / violent stuff. And even then they're more likely to do damage to themselves.

But, I'd say that most schizophrenics certianly have the capacity to be "reasonable persons", if they're on the right medication, or if they can reliably control it themselves. The latter (control it themselves) is the better option if they can get away with it. While the medication might help the delusions, I understand that it has a very bad numbing effect. Like anesthesia for the mind; it slows down and dulls all of the senses, and what little emotion they had before is likely to be all but gone.

Anyway... Chances are good that you know a person or two that can be classified as schizophrenic. It might affect about 1% of the people in the world at one point in their lives. It's notably more common in people of Norweigen and Irish decent (for better or for worse, I'm decended from both Irish and Norweigen ancestors, among others).

Legal?

[drcagn]

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?

Re:Legal?

[cpt kangarooski]

Actually, slander is by definition spoken. When printed or published, it is libel.

Secondly, the method that libel is disseminated is in fact of the upmost importance these days. Thanks to the one teeny tiny good (and constitutional) bit of the infamous CDA, it is legal for people providing services on the Internet (e.g. fora) to have libellous statements therein.

The originator of the libel can be sued -- but no suit can be brought against the web site where the libel resides.

The professor hasn't got a leg to stand on, and the site -- and the offensive comments -- need to go back up.

Re:Legal?

[cpt kangarooski]

I am having some trouble understanding this. I suspect you are not a native speaker of English.

1. It is true that libel and slander are not allowed because they can harm people's reputations. BUT, just hurting reputations isn't bad enough. The libel or slander must also be untrue. If it is true, then no matter how harmful it is to the victim, it is okay. Truth is a perfect defense. It is legal to speak the truth as far as libel and slander are in question.

2. Also, if there is no real harm to the victim's reputation, then it is okay. This can happen if, for example, no one would believe the libelous or slanderous statement. Famous people and government officials are more likely to not suffer harm (or to have to put up with it) than ordinary people.

3. Due to a special law, 47 USC 230, no one can sue a web site, ISP, or other Internet information provider, if all that they have done is to print libel that someone else made and gave to them.

For example, if I libeled someone here, then Slashdot is not responsible, and cannot be sued. I can still be sued though. And if I ran Slashdot, then Slashdot could be sued, since there was not a 'someone else' to give the libel to them.

This is a slightly new law. Under the old rules, a book publisher could be held responsible for the libel of an author since they were closely involved. A book seller probably would not be, however.

In sum, the web site here is OK and cannot be sued as long as they did not write the review that started this event. The professor is wrong to try. The professor can sue the person who actually wrote the review, however. I don't know who would win in that situation, because I don't know enough about it.

Prerequisite

[Ghoser777]

I'm pretty sure "Bipolar Paranoid Schizophrenic" (now spelled correctly) is a prerec for being a professor, so I'm not sure what he's complaining about.

Matt Fahrenbacher

Ebay precedent?

[Neppy]

Didn't Ebay just win a case that said they are not liable for the statements posted by users?
Wouldn't this logically apply to teacher reviews and make them nonliable for things posted by their users?

Re:Ebay precedent?

[chunkwhite86]

Didn't Ebay just win a case that said they are not liable for the statements posted by users? Wouldn't this logically apply to teacher reviews and make them nonliable for things posted by their users?

It's a good precedent but as the poster stated - he doesn't have the time/resources to put on a legal defense. No matter how good the previous rulings are, you still need legal counsel.

Re:Ebay precedent?

[88NoSoup4U88]

Yep, but the guy also says in his weblog that he does not have the money and/or time to spend on any lawsuit that might start out of this.
He is taking the safe route for now, and taken the whole thing down so he can review the whole situation.

Re:Ebay precedent?

[Trillian_1138]

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....

No more fun for me then....

[emily_the_dragonet]

I liked that site. My school had tons of reviewed teachers, and you could read 'em and then there would be this moment of "Hey! I know who wrote this!" That was cool. If one teacher has one problem, he should get it removed and make the site check what's being posted more. He doesn't need to shut the site down.

You don't need to delete all the site

[Via_Patrino]

You don't need to delete all the site, just delete the article the professor thought offensive, or mod it troll :-)

Re:You don't need to delete all the site

[tarth]

That's not insightful. Read what he said... even after removing the offending content the professor still threatened a lawsuit.

1st Amendment?

[t0rnt0pieces]

Doesn't the first amendment protect websites such as this? We may as well shut down every review website and magazine. Ok, maybe some slanderous things were said, but those comments were made by the reviewer and are not the opinion of the web site owner. Doesn't every similar website have that disclaimer?

Re:1st Amendment?

[line.at.infinity]

Although the reviewer could have said "He seems to be ____" instead of "He is ____" and gotten away with it, I suppose it was clear from context that the review was supposed to be taken figuratively. The student's opinion suppressed here is: "I don't recommend you to take his courses." Nobody should read anonymous sources on the internet without a grain of salt. Should the architect of a building be forced to bring down the building because it provided wall space where people can write lies on it?

E-Bay...

[Anonymous Coward]

E-Bay just won a court case where they were found to not be responsible for user feedback. Specifically not being responsible for policing or even being required to remove false feedback.

Just a few days later teacherreviews.com caves in? Typical.

Not surprising

[Killswitch1968]

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.

Re:Not surprising

[foonf]

I don't think a single university publically displays the stats of student reviews after a semester with a prof.

How much would you bet on that?

All you need for anon posting is to log the IP

[LostCluster]

True anonymous posting is simply imposible to allow because the web site operator ends up assuming the liablity for libel and slander when the eventual misbehaving trolls invade the site. The closest any web site operator can come is to know as little about their posters as possible, but to log the exact timestamp of the post and the IP address, so that if the site is ever bothered with a legal threat, those two pieces of information can be turned over, which when taken to the ISP starts a path that leads to the identity of the poster, or at least a service operator that (sometimes knowingly, sometimes not...) provides anonymity and will either A: be on the hook or B: continue the path that leads to the user...

Sorry, you've got to stand behind what you write, even online.

making student evaluations public

[ArgumentBoy]

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.

Re:making student evaluations public

[cperciva]

Personally, I think student evaluations should be made public. If a student completely fails to grasp even the simplest of concepts, and fails a course as a result, that information should be online as a public record so that people can choose to avoid that student in the future.

Oops. You're talking about the opposite type of student evaluations. My bad.

Re:making student evaluations public

[10101001 10101001]

The same can be said about *any* opinions expressed about anyone from anyone. The fact is, you just like most other people care what people say about you because you fear others will believe it's true. While I can sympathize with you, I think the best thing to say is to just deal with it.

Students badger other students. Professors have been known to badget other professors. And how many stories are there of professors who badger students? It's not surprising that there are students who do the same to professors. I'm not saying of the above is warranted or real (ie, it might just be paranoia). Of course, your case seems to prove that it's at least real.

The fact is, freedom of speech has been known to do a lot worse than ruin careers. Just think of the number of minorities or woman who have been physically assaulted or worse because of unfounded allegations. The simple fact is, there's very little that can be done about the speech itself because even removing this one site won't stop the word of mouth or a newsletter someone writes or the next blog someone starts. The only people you should really worry about is those in power to ruin your career or those around you who can do personal damage. The way of resolving that is to talk to them. While you're at it, maybe you can try a little harder to gain the respect of your students. You can't force people to think one way about you, but you can try your best to personally impress upon those people you think matter what you're really like so that you can alleviate your fears. There's no way elsewise to begin to solve the problem.

Polyratings

[Shaklee39]

Here at calpoly we have a third party ratings system at http://www.polyratings.com which does almost the same thing. I was looking on it the other day and there are comments about how they want a teacher to die, just random profanity unrelated to the class, among others. The site has not been taken down, nor has it even removed these comments which are still up for everyone to see. Anyone with a half brain ignores these comments and just goes to the next one anyways since they are probably from a disgruntled student who couldn't make the grade.

Re:Polyratings

[CoconutFoobar]

As a student at Boston College, our student government, the UGBC has a professor evaluation system that is heavily used. It's all anonymous, but if a teacher sees something untrue or if the review is inappropriate, then it can be signaled for review and removal. I think this helps the education system and I know I've come very close to taking a bad prof until I check their PEPs.

Speaking as a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic...

[MichaelCrawford]

I think it's wrong that calling somebody that could be construed as an insult.

I've been working for quite some time to change that.

• Living with Schizoaffective Disorder

Re:Other sites?

[John Courtland]

ratemyprofessors.com

PARANOID?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid people are talking about me behind my back, they're always there, there always watching, I'll just google my name..

Hmm, TeacherReviews.com? I'M ON THERE?!?!?!!?!?

WHAT? WHAT? I'M NOT A BIOPOLAR PARANOID SCHITZOPHRENIC! I KNOW, I'LL SUE THEM!

one example...

[tsunamifirestorm]

is ucsdprofessor.com good site for me (as a UCSD student obviously) and it would be cool if all universities had things like this.

Said the Professor:

[parliboy]

"I'm not paranoid! Which one of my enemies told you that?"

That Pesky Thing...

[suwain_2]

Is that "Constitution" thing still intact? I seem to recall a portion of it with some silly notion of "freedom of speech" or something, or was it repealed?

"Bipolar Paranoid Schizophrenic."

[PhyreFox]

Bipolar: Relating to a major affective disorder that is characterized by episodes of mania and depression.

Paranoid: Exhibiting or characterized by extreme and irrational fear or distrust of others.

Schizophrenic: Of, relating to, or characterized by the coexistence of disparate or antagonistic elements.

Now considering I'm not a psychologist, I don't know about #1 and #3, but as the comments were deleted and he still threatened to sue, the "paranoid" label sounds appropriate.

Re:Other sites?

[Zycom]

Here in Jersey, we use RateMyTeachers.com . Halfway through the last semester, a teacher of mine actually told us to rate him on there. Its anonymous, so he could find out what people really thought about him and adjust accordingly.

Nobody did it. I think that says something about how much people respect him.

Chilling effect

[joelparker]

Today is a professor vs. teacher reviews...
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

Anyone else notice...

[Ghoser777]

that if you make a tangential remark related to SCO/RIAA/Microsoft, you get modded up to funny?

Matt Fahrenbacher

Exactly the wrong response.

[DavittJPotter]

Unfortunately, the magic curse of "I'll sue!" once again forces something unpopular to an individual or a small group to conform or bow to their will. All this does is reinforce the power of frivolous and stupid lawsuits. Fine, the professor didn't like or agree with what was said about him. He could have had the site admin take it down for review, or asked for rational discourse. If indeed the slam was incorrect or unwarranted, then it shouldn't remain.

Now, this professor has forced a valuable tool off-line, thereby preventing other prospective students from finding out about difficult/unreasonable professors or classes they choose to avoid. Many of these professors *shouldn't* be teaching any more, and if enough students learn to avoid their classes, maybe it will help that school with some positive change.

Sadly, this seemingly paranoid and thin-skinned professor (oops, maybe he'll threaten to sue me now!) makes a huge deal out of a negative review, and now further entrenches the 'false' reputation he feels he doesn't deserve.

RIT Professor Evaluations

[gjb6676]

Many professor rating systems are threatened with legal action. We ran a similar system at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology). For a long time the site was under intense pressure from the academic senate. After awhile they realized they had no legal grounds and left us alone.

We ended up exporting all of our comments (over 7000) to TeacherReviews. We figured they already survived one lawsuit, so they would be around longer than us.

Looks like we were wrong... the RIT only review site is still online, read-only though: http://professor.ritstuff.com Username: pguest Password: pguest

RateMyProfessors

[MattHawk]

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.

Re:RateMyProfessors

[Valafar]

It most certainly *IS* legal to say that someone is "crazy" or "psychotic". This is clearly a matter of opinion; regardless free speech still applies.

Here's an example:

Fred Phelps is a "Baptist Preacher" in Topeka, Kansas who pickets funerals of people who die from aids with signs that say "God hates fags", etc.

Now, I personally think he's a fuck-nut and is clearly psycho. Can he sue me for saying this? Not in a million years.

Well....

[danoatvulaw]

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.

Re:Well....

[danoatvulaw]

only on weeknights when the temperature drops to below freezing.. but i stress ONLY ON WEEKNIGHTS!

It's going back up.

[MacGabhain]

Somewhat ironic timing on the information from a week ago, as today's blog entry is that the site is being completely rewritten with some changes to address these concerns and will be back up soon.

February 10th blog entry

In part:
TeacherReviews.com is coming back, and it's going to be better than ever - for both students and professors.
The professor who threatened a lawsuit has decided to drop the case. This happened after we talked about the situation, the site as it is today, and the intent of the site, which has always been to help students, as opposed to insult professors. This professor is now helping the site by providing feedback to the new features from a professor's point of view, which is something I have not looked into before.

How'd you like to reverse the roles?

[StupendousMan]

I'm a professor, and I've seen the same mix of praise, criticism, and just plain garbage in reviews of me published on one particular public web site. It's the same old story: any unmoderated site is soon overrun with trash.

The galling feature of all the "Rate-A-Professor" sites I've seen is the anonymity they provide. I wonder how many students would post messages like "You suck!" if they had to attach their names at the end? But they never do ...

Let me put the shoe on the other foot -- suppose that someone started a "Rate-A-Student" web site, where professors could post messages anonymously like "Mr. Smith came to class only four times all quarter, and snored his way through two of those. He showed no initiative, failed completely to understand the concept of square roots, has abysmal handwriting, and shows little sign of being able to communicate with his peers." The site could advertise to employers -- "Hey, want to check up on that guy who applied for your Network Administration opening? Check out comments made by those who worked with him for months!"

How long would a site like that last?

Re:How'd you like to reverse the roles?

[Narchie Troll]

There already is such a system.

It's called "grades."

Re:How'd you like to reverse the roles?

[Savage Conan]

Just as there is a system for teacher evaluations set in place. However a grade does not tell the whole story. Unfortunately we can't grade attitude.

Re:How'd you like to reverse the roles?

[Unominous Coward]

suppose that someone started a "Rate-A-Student" web site, where professors could post messages anonymously

If you were paying students to study there, you would be completely justified to have the site corrected or moderated (not pulled down).

These professor rating sites are in the same league as consumer reviews of cars, computers and ISPs. In other words, they are there to help the paying consumers make a more informed choice about their purchase.

Even if there were libellous material on the website, it should be treated in exactly the same way that other public websites are, i.e., sending a warning to the webmaster, and then legal action, if necessary.

Just because you're a professor, doesn't give you the right to censor public discussion of your activities as a professor.

Re:How'd you like to reverse the roles?

[Lord Omlette]

Nope, anonymity is the only way to get feedback from students. Our school provides anonymous evaluationsn for our Professors:

raises/promotions + firings + who teaches what + "Do we offer this class next semester" are all based on anonymous evaluation. Otherwise kids are too scared to say anything because they're afraid of reprisal, and we never get the feedback we need.

Your "drop the hammer on the other foot" idea is intriguing though, I'd love to see something like that

Article lists wrong reason for shutdown

[YrWrstNtmr]

The site was taken down because a professor complained about comments made against him, and threatened to sue.

No. The site was taken down because the site owner caved (temporarily) in the face of a potential lawsuit. There was no legal decision, no jackbooted thugs at the door, no massive DoS attack, no trashing the First Amendment.

The site owner took it down himself. And it appears it will be coming back online, with some form of moderation.

aye that's libel

[Anonymous Coward]

>>"Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic."'

Well the teacher's right. Unless one can prove that they have been diagnosed as that and that its applicable to what they were saying then its libel and yes as a publisher you could be sued for libel.

People often make the mistake that they have freedom to say whatever they want and that's just not the case at all, those rights have to do with government interference not personal.

I don't agree

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unmoderated posting of these things on the internet is a bad idea, personally damaging, and maybe harmful to careers."

Who would moderate? The professor?

Your entire argument boils down to this:
"If bad words get around about my teaching, I could be ruined".

Well. Yeah. Isn't that kind of the point? Well, not really, but as a professor, you are selling your ability to teach to student. If you suck at teaching, then a student should know that and be able to avoid you.

Teachers resist this kind of feedback because they refuse to acknowledge their first responsibility is to their students.

It would be refreshing if a professor created his own blog/rating system where students could rate him, and then he could respond if he wanted to comments.

Everybody would understand that a comment of "You suck" is a joke. But a comment of "The professor was consistenly 15 minutes late for class, his tests covered material that I'd never seen, and his attitude towards his students was awful. I don't recommend him/her". This is legit. This should be viewed for all the world to see. And if a professor isn't willing to be held up to scrutiny for students paying $10's of thousand per year, then maybe he/she should find another line of work.

Anonymous teacher rating sites are worthless

[madmancarman]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but anonymous teacher rating sites are largely worthless because, with no accountability, there's no reason for anyone to be truthful, whether they're supportive or critical. We've seen the effect anonymity has on people who post to usenet, send email, and troll slashdot - no direction connection with real lfie and a person's reputation, so no real accountability.

There's a similar web site called RateMyTeachers.com that lets you rate high school teachers (its sister site, RateMyProfessors.com, offers the same service for college profs). I've been teaching high school for 5 1/2 years now, and after my sister emailed me a link to the ratings site, I immediately told my students that hang out in my classroom during lunch to go to the site and say the meanest, most ridiculous things about me possible. Why? Simply to prove the point that if students who like me can say awful, untrue things about me and have them published on the internet, then it's impossible to take those reviews any more seriously than a slashdot poll.

Now, as a professional educator, I value feedback and constructive criticism (it's a fundamental basis of education, so if it's good enough for our students, then why not the teachers?), but like any feedback, it needs to be accompanied with sufficient explanation and some degree of trust. Unfortunately, there's no incentive for anyone to be constructive or even honest on sites that allow anonymous ratings. Sure, you might be able to get an overall view of how students liked or disliked a teacher or professor, but giving them a numerical rating from 1.0 to 5.0 is as useful as basing a person's abilities solely on their SAT, ACT or IQ test score.

If a student really wants to have an effect on a teacher, they should go and talk to them about the problems they were having or make some friendly suggestions. Is this going to work on every teacher? Absolutely not - teachers can be some of the most egotistical and defensive people, and there are some you simply can't reach. (You should see teachers react to having other teachers come into their classroom for peer review - you can almost see their skin crawl.) However, I've found some of the negative comments I received about my teaching, especially early on when I was student teaching, which was such a bad experience that I considered not going into teaching at all, and from students who try but are still struggling, are some of the most helpful when I try to improve my teaching abilities.

However, I simply don't think online, anonymous reviews do anyone any good any more than high-stakes testing helps schools or students improve. The only way to improve a professor or teacher is to try to approach them about their shortcomings, and if that doesn't work (which really wouldn't be surprising), then switch classes and take someone you can enjoy, or suffer through it and hope the class goes quickly.

I am a teacher

[b17bmbr]

I am a high school history teacher (and geek on the side!!). I don't give two cents worth about teacherreviews.com. And yes, I'm on there (the ratmyteacher.com site I think), and yes, I've checked. Why would I have been rated low? Hmmm, perhaps because I am not the easiest history teacher on campus. For instance, our semester project is an historical biography of a 20th century figure. Kids ar reading everyone from Roosevelt (both), Hitler, Stalin, Che, Reagan, Dr. King, etc. Some of the books I had to say no to simply because the person, while interesting, was not an historical figure. Or perhaps because I assign more reading than just the book. Last semester we read from Locke's Second Treatise, Rousseau's Social Contract, and Hobbes' Leviathan. The assignment was to write about what each would have said about the US constitution. That is why I am not the "favorite" teacher. I can deal with that. I would rather be tougher and challenge them. How 'bout a teacherreview.com when they're 25, eh?

Re:I am a teacher

[Cycline3]

Some of my favorite professors were my hardest. Don't just think becuase you give homework you'll get a bad rep. And don't think that automatically makes you a great teacher either. It simply doesn't work that way.

Re:well

[Trejkaz]

Just not a lawsuit on the site, assuming the site disclaimed that any content within was not property of the site, nor endorsed by the site, yada yada IANAL.

Travesty

[Anonymous Coward]

I find the taking down of this website to be an absolute travesty and a disservice to all teachers whose students post feedback on the site.

As an executive manager myself, feedback is absolutely critical to personal and professional improvement. Managers who do not listen to the folks they manage are often have very short and exlosively misguided careers. Often the personnel themselves are significantly more experienced or more recently experienced in the field that one manages, so to ignore them is to make a constant slew of inevitable mistakes. Managers and execs MUST take into account the opinions of their folks to achieve success.

In the same vein, teachers are managers of students and the learning process. These teachers must have an avenue for feedback (even if students only feel comfortable commenting in annonymous web-based environments such as TeacherReviews) to improve. To deny students and teachers themselves this feedback, is to admit that you are unwilling to improve.

In regards to the few blatant examples of potentially undeserved negative feedback, anyone with a little backbone and self-confidence should be able to see through these. Ignore the few so as not to invalidate the mass.

Within these terms, notification of the professors that comments have been written on them is potentially an extremely valuable addition to the site. The limiting factors that the site author proposes should be dropped out of hand as they limit the value of the vast majority of content, but the lack of quality in a few posts.

Bottom line, put the site back up. You are providing an invaluable tool to both students and teachers. The constitution and court precedence clearly protects you (as delineated by other posts) so any suit should be thrown out in the preliminary stages. Teachers should (and hopefully do) applaud your efforts, not resort to whining to the 'principal' when they get called a bad name.

Guess he'll become even more popular now

[totatis]

So, basically, in order to avoid being seen as some psycho by a few students, he looks like an asshole to the whole world.

This slashdot publicity should really help him regain his reputation !

I Got Shut Down The Same Way

[Cycline3]

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.

pure bs

[gt25500]

I've checked out this site in the past. Good teachers get good reviews. Bad teachers get bad reviews. Perhaps we should get rid of movie and book critics. The fact is, this teacher was most probably an asshole and deserved the reviews he got.

Anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

A teacher friend of mine told me about a student he had in his persuasive writing class. This student had given him a number of problems throughout the class, asking for extensions, requesting a meeting between the teacher and the students' psychiatrist, etc. At the end of the semester my friend had to give the student a poor grade because the student just hadn't done the work required.

The student wrote an inflammatory letter about the teacher to my friend's superior . His superior agreed on a meeting with the student where he basically told the student - "The point of this class was to teach persuasive writing, and after reading your letter I would tend to agree with your teachers evaluation."

Um, How does Slashdot handle this?

[Mulletproof]

I mean we're talking about the same thing really, right? Lord only knows how many people get panned and flamed on this forum, any one of which could be considered libel. I know part of it is the disclaimers plastered across the site, so what happened with Teacher Review? Maybe Slashdot simply has more money to fend off these attacks?

Re:Um, How does Slashdot handle this?

[WildBeast]

Yeah, Slashdot has got the money not to mention the huge publicity if anything like that was attempted and you can be sure that the huge members base will be helping out with money very quickly.

You forgot to say IANAL

[PCM2]

Actually, slander is by definition spoken. When printed or published, it is libel.

That actually depends on the jurisdiction. The state of Illinois, for instance, makes no distinction between the two -- all types of defamation are treated the same under the law. On the other hand, in California the definition of slander is much more specific than that of libel -- meaning you might overhear a spoken statement and quote it in print, and while the original speaker's statement might not be deemed slanderous, your putting it in print could still be considered libel. (Source: The Associated Press Stylebook.)

Paranoid and Schitzophrenic.... not yet!

[failedlogic]

You ain't seen nothing yet. Wait until you see his reaction when he sees his bandwidth bill after getting a /.'ing ;)

On a separate note, I'm a 3rd year university student. I think anyone can attest that they've had good & bad professors.

I think this site may well be valuable to students. This site is certainly prone to slandering. I would have loved to have read reviews of teachers before taking a class. In university you don't always know students who'd taken a class. It's easy to miss a class from a good professor and equally easy to sign up with a bad professor. I think some amount of review should be made of the reviews and perhaps proof of enrollment. I don't advocate censorship but this would at least remove slanderous or untrue accounts.

Admittedly, determining what qualities make a good or bad professor is subjective. On the other hand, universities should be more forthcoming about the results of teacher reviews. They discard the reviews as if they never happened. Students cannot find out from the faculty or administration which teachers are performing well and which are not.

Thoughts on Alternatives.

[DarkHelmet]

Amazon.com has a nice little feature that says, "Is this review useful?"

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)

F***ed Company

[salesgeek]

They need to simply follow Pud's lead at F***ed Company and post the cease and desist letters. If you piss off students so bad you need to get a lawyer to shut them up, there is something wrong with you.

Actually -- TeacherReviews is coming back.

[dylan95]

Actually -- TeacherReviews is coming back.

I put up another blog post this morning at about 4am about it:

Quoted from
http://www.dylangreene.com/blog.asp?blogID=3 88

==================
TeacherReviews.com is coming back, and it's going to be better than ever - for both students and professors.

The professor who threatened a lawsuit has decided to drop the case. This happened after we talked about the situation, the site as it is today, and the intent of the site, which has always been to help students, as opposed to insult professors. This professor is now helping the site by providing feedback to the new features from a professor's point of view, which is something I have not looked into before.

Here are some changes I've been working on:

Redesigned and rebuilt the entire site from scratch. Not one line of HTML, ASP, or stored procedure code is from the old site. There will be a fresh new look that will hopefully be easier for you to navigate, and the system will make it easier for me to plug new features into.
I've reorganized the database. For example, departments are now associated with classes instead of professors - since a professor might teach classes in different departments, but classes typically don't change departments. All 34,000 reviews are still there.
Reviews can be "Flagged for Removal." Anybody can flag a review, but only volunteers and I will have the ability to permanently delete them. When a review is flagged, you will see the grade and the flag, but not the content unless it is unflagged.
When a Flagged Review is removed, it is considered Banned from the system. If a user has too many Banned reviews, that user risks being banned from using TeacherReviews.
Professors who ask not to be reviewed will still have their names in the system and it will still accept new reviews for them in case they change their mind. Their reason for not wanting to be on the site will replace their reviews.
Helping out:

Contact your editors: TeacherReviews can make a great story for your school or local paper. I've been interviewed twice this week from different papers. Who's next?
Donate: Donations will go toward improving TeacherReviews unless you say otherwise.
Create Fliers: Schools always have players for posting flyers. Save those fliers because I'm also going to create a Flier Exchange to share your fliers with others.
Finally - once again, thank you everybody who wrote in. As of right now (~4am), my blog entry "What Happened to TeacherReviews?" has just under 200 comments. I've received over 100 emails, and I think I managed to reply to every single one of them. If you didn't get a reply it might have been eaten by my spam filter.

So... Save your TeacherReviews.com bookmarks. The new site is coming soon.
==================

My first time being slashdotted and I was off watching The Daily Show...

Use a trust method

[macdaddy]

I vote for a trust method or mechanism to weed out the trolls. A review from a student that has only submitted a single review should have very little weight on the professor's overall score. In fact it should receive a low "trust" rating on the website. As that student submits more reviews of other professors that student's "trust" rating should increase. Think of it like karma; until you prove to a subset of the masses that your comments (reviews) are ontopic, well-written, and worthwhile your karma (trust rating) won't be high enough to adversely affect the thread (professor). This would be one simple solution.

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.

RMT is better...

[jkmiecik]

There is a different website, called Rate My Teachers that has a MASSIVE system of moderation in place so comments like the ones from this story never see the public. Before you say it's impossible to moderate all of that - the top moderator on that site has reviewed over 60000 comments. That's just the top one out 3662 moderators.

Forget it

[SnprBoB86]

www.ratemyteachers.com
and
www.ratemyprofessors. com
are still around.

They are based on the same system (operated by the same people) and they have a pretty decent system for regulating comments and reviews.

My major complaint with both of the fact that ANYONE can annonymously mark a comment as inappropreiate which allows anyone to "deface" the site.

Also if a school's administration isn't careful just anyone (READ students) can become the admin of their www.ratemy*.com account very easily by writing a simple e-mail.

i cant spell and i didnt type this comment in ms word first... sorry :-P

-SniperBoB-

A shame -- it really helps

[shadowmatter]

Although I've never used TeacherReviews.com, here at UCLA we have a similar service called bruinwalk.com where students can rate their professors on axes of effectiveness, difficulty, concern, availability, and give an overall rating. Almost every student here uses it to find classes with the best professors each quarter, and a good number rate their professors at the end. What's more, some professors even go online and check their ratings and reviews to figure out what they can improve upon, and what they're doing right.

Although some students leave worthless feedback, and some people use it simply to find the easiest professor, I think sites like these are needed -- after all, it's your education, and if you're a good student, you'd want to make the most of it for your money. I guess I feel you're almost entitled to it. If you don't have a good professor, then you simply aren't as motivated, skip class, slack on the homework, and come out learning very little. In some classes, books can only take your knowledge so far; from thereon, it's the professors that make the difference. So if universities are there to promote knowledge and further understanding, shouldn't sites like these be the next logical step?

- shadowmatter

Libel

[That's Unpossible!]

For the clueless... yes, it is illegal to print falsehoods about a non-celebrity (and in most cases, a celebrity).

The Obvious Solution

[atubbs]

The obvious solution is to implement a slashdot-like system with regards to reviews. By default, reviews will be given no clout, and it takes review by peers to validate them before they are even displayed. Thus "THIS TEACHER FUCKING SUCKS" which while possibly true offers no value will not end up being seen unless somebody is browsing at the troll level. That way constructive and critical comments will both be available, but only those that are thought out and respectable; anything below that can be taken as heresay.

tenure's effect on teaching

[jeisner]

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.

As a not-yet-tenured computer science prof, I think this is a misleading, even backward, account of how tenure affects teaching.

Do you really think that untenured profs are under pressure to teach well? At a research university, our tenure case depends much more on the ability to get grants and do influential research. Of course we untenured folk are expected to teach and do everything else well, too, but given that time is finite, we're usually advised to teach adequately without wasting too much time on it, and make sure the research is brilliant. So you ought to expect that it's untenured faculty who neglect teaching in favor of research.

You're correct that tenure may further reduce the incentive to teach well. But hey, it also reduces the incentive to get grants, do research, speak politely to one's colleagues, etc. So why do you conclude specifically that teaching will lose out to research once the pressure's off? Here are some guesses that are more logical but still misinformed:

• "Tenured faculty have more freedom to allocate their time among these activities as they see fit, without the dean or tenure committee looking over their shoulder. Some may prefer research, others teaching."

  This is sort of true, but there are many other pressures on how profs allocate their time. Taking away the tenure issue doesn't suddenly free us up to do what we like. There are always a zillion things that have to be taken care of today.

• "Tenured faculty have no incentive to do anything, and 'allocate their time' to sitting on their duffs. So they teach worse and do less research."

  Fortunately, this cynical proposition doesn't at all match my experience of CS profs. Faculty who make it to tenure tend to continue working very hard. They generally have a strong work ethic and identify with their jobs. Usually they also have a sense of duty toward their undergrad students, grad students, and grant sponsors.

You may be thinking: Ok, tenured profs may keep working hard, but won't they spend all their time on research once they can get away with it? Don't professors just prefer research? Obviously profs at research universities do enjoy research -- after all, we emerged from a Ph.D. still liking it enough that we took a job where independent research was required. But we also enjoy teaching (or at least mentorship) -- otherwise we'd have gone off to do research in industry, at twice the salary and half the hassle. So don't assume we'd all just like to ditch the teaching in favor of research as soon as we can.

Now, it may well be that your original conclusion happens to be right, and tenured profs do focus more on research than untenured profs. But here are three possible explanations for such a correlation (if it exists):

• Causal explanation (which you proposed in your post): "Their priorities changed as soon as they got job protection."

  Doubtful (based on conversations with many tenured faculty). Tenure is unlikely to change my priorities at all. I do what I do because I like to do it and because other people (especially students) depend on me to do it. If you get tenure, nothing changes, and you're very relieved about that. You just go on doing what you were doing before.

• Selection bias explanation: "The profs who spend all their time teaching don't get tenure. So the ones who are left after tenure were the ones who preferred research in the first place."

  This explanation has some merit (since a few great, committed teachers do get thrown away like this), but it doesn't go too far. In my experience, most faculty who are denied tenure were trying to play the research game and are not noticeably better teachers than the

Freedom of speech?

[KZigurs]

Hello guys, are you really telling that your legal system is SO screwed now that you cannot post your negative opinion about some person online? Somehow I have always believed that this was quite an important point of Freedom of speech, that USA is so proud of. Or isn't the CNN the only entity in USA that has no rights to say anything true or unpleasant to someone else... Fuck the professors. I'm sure that even in case if maintainer of site GETS suied, it would be a simple post in a site to raise all the necessary funds for best legal defense someone can afford (and truthfully in such a case it would require about three hours of work from a competent lawyer + court appearance). Get a life, dear paranoid americans. Do you really will always consider that someone is threatening your positions? Then they were commies, now they are students. And your army still walks around the world doing whatever it wants without any reason.

Re:Freedom of speech?

[saddino]

Hello guys, are you really telling that your legal system is SO screwed now that you cannot post your negative opinion about some person online? Somehow I have always believed that this was quite an important point of Freedom of speech, that USA is so proud of.

The US legal system has always defended against slander and libel. And thus, you're free to make as many negative opinions about people as you wish. However, you may not state falsehoods about people as fact.

IMHO, the system probably doesn't seem as "screwed" if you are the victim.

who scored you "Insightful"??

[corbettw]

Abortion doctors get shot, gays get crucified, blacks get dragged behind pickup trucks, planned parenthoods get bombed, black churches get burned.

Republican tend to resort to violence early and often.

First off, only two wars in the history of the US were initiated with Republican Presidents in office: Gulf Wars I and II. Every other war from the War of 1812 on were started by Democrats (I'm including the Civil War in this, as it was Southern Democrats who seceeded from the Union and sparked the war). So to claim that Republicans "resort to violence early and often" is just plain assinine.

Secondly, no political persusasion is free of nutjobs out to hurt or destroy innocent people (incidentally, the nutjobs who burned down black churches and tried to blow them up in the South in the 60s were all Democrats, as was Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the KKK). Trying to paint all conservatives as violent maniacs is hateful speech, pure and simple.

Why is it that liberals constantly feel the need to attack conservatives and their principles in such crude and childish fashion?

IAAP

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 .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.

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.

Query?

[juuri]

Why don't you just establish a rating system for reviews. Allow students who submit reviews to also rate other submitted reviews. This would easily allow you to move the trash down below a viewable threshold. It would also encourage people to leave longer, more detailed reviews full of useful content.

Re:well

[ComaVN]

Ah yes, he's in denial. How typical for his condition.

True

[unassimilatible]

The Chronicle for Higher Education linked a story not too long ago that said just this: Easier, or grade-inflating professors tend to be rated higher, whereas challenging professors tend to be rated lower.

It's like the mom who gives her kid candy: "My mom is cool."

Yeah, but she's a lousy mom!

"Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic."

[jellomizer]

of course a "Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic" is the exact type of person who would sue a company because he got bad press from it. A well adjusted person would go well that is only one review and let it slide off there back. And if anyone confronts them they just say well you can't please everyone. But the Paranoid person who sees this sees a much bigger plot happening to them, so they will do all in their power to stop it. A Bipolar person who sees this as wrong will go to the extremes to stop it (I.E. Sue someone). But if he saw it as good then he will support it with all his effort.
As for Schitzophrenic that could possible be an exaggeration. But it sounds like he still needs to take a Chill Pill.

Fighting liar with liar

[Colonel Cholling]

When I was at Mississippi State University, a similar website was started to allow students to review professors. While some of the posts were informative or insightful (maybe they need a karma system?) others were clearly the result of some trustfund kids slamming good professors because they actually made them do work.

When word got around that some departments were actually taking comments about teachers at face value, I decided to engage in some creative culture jamming to demonstrate the fact that just anyone could post just anything. So I started adding reviews for professors who did not, in fact, exist, or at least were never employed at MSU. Highlights included this army ROTC instructor, this history instructor, and this French instructor. I also included a review of Paul Erdos in the Math department-- one of the departments that had been taking the reviews a bit too seriously-- and found it mysteriously deleted. But at least they realized that there is no "fact-checking" mechanism on that site.

In retrospect I can't say whether I had any effect on school or society, but it at least provided a few hours' entertainment.

Re:Why is it bad for students to grade teachers?

[arkanes]

No - the immunity would only apply if you allow ALL comments without editorial or censorship. If everyone has free reign to speak, then nobody has any greater credibility. Newspapers do NOT print every letter recieved (unless they're very small) - it's a practical impossibility.

Note that I'm not talking about immunity for the people posting the comments, neccesarily - I'm talking about immunity for the people HOSTING the comments, which is where people attack.

I also think that you tend to over-estimate the credibility of an attack, particularly in a forum where the accused has an equal voice.

That said, I also don't have all that much against repealling or at least limiting our current libel and slander laws - truth should (of course) be an absoulte defense, plausible truch should be near-absolute, opinion rather than stated fact should have a very high burden of proof of both intent to and actual harm before the speech is even removed, much less damages awarded. The more free your speech, the more free your freedoms - there is no way that unrestricted speech can make people less free. Only restricted speech can do that.

Rate Yourself

[avaric3]

One of these sites was advertised during the morning announcements in our school.

One teacher saw that he had a few negative comments, so what did he do? He rated himself about a dozen times and his rating went up. At lunch time that day, we discussed the site and voted each other up. We also voted a few of our more annoying "colleagues" down. I had a good rating before, but now my rating is almost perfect :)

As long as anyone can post without registering this will always be a worthless tool. Make it so that you have to register and tie that registration to an *ISP* or *university* email address (no hotmail ,yahoo, etc) and you will cut down on the crap significantly. You don't even have to post identifying info, just limit who can post.

A natural comparison would be Doctors

[ianscot]

In the mid-90s I was tangentially involved with setting up a Web site for a major insurer on which they included personal information about Doctors. This site was completely controlled by the insurer, which was a staff model HMO -- so the Doctors on the site were full-time employees of the HMO, and basically they had to consent to the site. (It'd be different for a more loosely-defined network in a non-staff-model outfit, I'm sure.) The idea was to provide patients with some better way to choose a physician.

Anyway, some of the technophile doctors liked this idea a lot, and it had started with one of them. Lots of the rest of them resented the site as a marketing idea that was beneath them as professionals. When they were asked to provide a personal essay to describe their interests, for example, they sent a taciturn phrase or two at most. The HMO took a fair amount of heat from its doctors about the project.

The idea of patient feedback was floated, in talking about this site originally, but got totally panned by even the technophile docs. The idea of patients with a grudge was obviously on their minds -- and the potential positive of patients who were able to choose doctors based on, say, other patients' descriptions of how communicative they were, that was a complete non-starter. Even the positive votes definitely wanted to control the content on the site completely. At the highest levels of the HMO mother ship, they were just wanting to save on calls asking for a woman internist who spoke Spanish, and to get a little marketing capital too.

I had plenty of profs in college who were totally uninspired classroom speakers. Those people don't want to have students telling each other about them any more than the ordinary word-of-mouth can let that happen.

Speaking as a professor...

[Debillitatus]

Let me say that I don't much care whether or not I am featured on such a site. But the reason is that I really know that these sites are complete wastes of time and energy.

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.

Bwahahahah....

[raehl]

I went to the University of Illinois. I was accepted into the Chancellor's Scholar program, which requires some set of nerdy grades/test scores to qualify for and an essay read by the current members and faculty supporters of the program to be admitted. About 1% of students are in the program, so we can safely say that the program represented no worse than the top 2% of the class.

Now, part of being in the program is getting to take special honors classes that are pretty much limited to Chancelor's Scholars. Basically a variety of interesting classes covering some cool material in-depth. (Yes, I'm aware that's a fragment.)

One semester I took a shakespeare class that involved some peer reading/editing of papers. I am sad to report that only about 30% of the students in this class were capable of writing a simple essay with an introduction, body, conclusion, and complete sentences.

And we're talking about the top 2% of college students.

It's sad. Nobody can write anymore. It's perfectly possible to get through high school having never written a good paper and still get good grades because nobody makes you write essays anymore and even if they do, as long as your answers are right they don't really care about form.

And I think it's starting to have a negative impact in rather visible areas of our society - like journalism. I think journalists are getting incredibly dumb - because you don't need to be a decent journalist to write for a major publication anymore - anyone who can actually write complete sentences is so rare that they'll do.

Re:Bwahahahah....

[InfiniterX]

I remember taking an undergrad engineering management course which involved writing a few group papers.

The final paper assignment was to write a 20-page paper on the given topic. The topic could easily be subdivided into four sections, and in a dramatic stroke of irony, the professor had put people into groups of four to complete the assignment.

Plan seems simple, right? Everyone writes five pages, we wrap on a nice little introduction and conclusion, and merge our references into one nice section at the end. I wrote my five pages early on and thought everything was in the bag.

No. The other group members contributed five badly-written pages, and the content on three of them overlapped with what someone else in the group wrote. Suddenly all the redundancies turn an easily-done 20 page paper into an 8 page paper which needs lots of work at the very last minute.

What scared me was how these people might write code later. There was a failure to analyze the problem, figure out what other people were doing, and fill in the gaps... just like every group-oriented software project I've ever taken part in.

Re:what about book or software review sites?

[madmancarman]

By your logic the comment systems on amazon.com or download.com would be worthless. On the contrary, I have found these services to be very reliable on the whole.

I typed in the subject for my post before I wrote it, so it doesn't completely represent what I was trying to get across. Teacher review sites can have some useful information, but because they're necessarily anonymous, you can't truly fully trust any of the ratings on an individual basis.

The same is true of Amazon. Taken together and interpreted as a whole, the reviews can be helpful in trying to gauge the quality or desirability of a product, but individually they're susceptible to bias and outright misinformation. Take Michael Moore's latest book, "Dude, Where's My Country?". Look at some of the recent 1-star reviews (I've bolded things that appear to be personal attacks instead of useful advice):

• Michael Moore, here are a few words of advice: Take a shower, lose some weight, shave once in a while, and, most importantly, stop writing stupid books and making fallacious movies. To everyone else: For a better read, pick up something by someone who hasn't been brainwashed. And maybe listen to a Led Zep CD or something! Then watch the O'Reilly Factor and FoxNews. Just my advice
• Ignorance is bliss and that pretty much explains why this book sells. People believe anything that is published. No facts, pure bias and opinion. I read two chapters and sold the book on ebay. Obviously i'm not a pure unquestioned right-winger since I bought the book. I believe in facts and research, not opinion. The book pinpoints and streamlines the typical media bias, brainwashing and filtering of facts. If you are a braindead, DON'T-HAVE-MY-OWN-OPINION dopey liberal, you'll enjoy the book. If you want to waste your money go ahead, you have my blessings.
  (One note about this: the first chapter of the book, whether right or wrong, is heavily researched and contains many, many footnotes that attribute statements to the published news articles they were drawn from.)
• This book is a liberals screaming cry for help. Founded on the communist manifesto, the author is highly skilled in spreading lies. The book is really a waste of time if you're looking for the truth. A better book would be," The Real Lincoln",or Webster's Dictionary.

Of course, there were 10 5-star reviews submitted the very day that book was released, so you can search for bias on the other side of the political spectrum as well. For example, "Bias" received a 1-star review within a day or two of being published: "This book is full of (...), innuendo, and (...). There is just as much of a conservative bias in the media as there is a liberal bias. It just shows up in different places. Don't believe this poor analysis. The media may present a distorted veiw, but this book gets IT ALL WRONG. " There may be legitimate 5-star and 1-star reviews for books on Amazon, but it's difficult to take any of them seriously with crap like this.

Admirably, Amazon does some things that teacher rating sites could pick up on - rating of reviews (i.e., "23 out of 30 people found this review helpful") and featured "Spotlight Reviewers", who put their names and reputations behind what they write. Unfortunately, the number of teachers and professors a person will have in their education is probably not as large as the number of books they'll read, so I don't know how useful those features would be with teacher ratings.

I guess I probably should have said "Anonymous reviews are untrustworthy and subject to unsupported opinions and personal attacks" instead of calling them completely worthless, but I feel they're about as useful as a slashdot poll - possibly interesting, somewhat amusing, but not much beyond that.