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TeacherReviews.com Forced Offline
MrCawfee writes "Dylan Greene's site Teacher Reviews which allows students to post reviews of their professors. The site was taken down because a professor complained about comments made against him, and threatened to sue. Here is an exerpt from his blog: 'Yesterday and tonight I talked with a professor who was extremely upset with what written about him on TeacherReviews. He had several inappropriate reviews that made unfounded accusations and inappropriate untruthful remarks such as calling him "Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic."' You can read his blog here."
Some schools endorsed this. If you google, some schools even link to it
What happened to TeacherReviews?
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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:
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*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
The problem is, a good system would allow exactly those kinds of comments. Slashdot, for example, allows you to post whatever you want, but you can get modded down and not be seen. A similar system would work for teacher reviews - if you want to read all of the "drivel" (per se) then go ahead.
Is this legal? I don't understand how user submitted reviews would get this site knocked offline. How is this any different from someone posting bad stuff about a teacher on a LiveJournal (or other blogging site) blog?
Scorta futuere amo!
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.
Once profs have tenure their incentive to teach better is dramatically reduced. If they can get more grants doing research with no chance of being fired for imcompentent teaching then you can believe the grants will come first.
This becomes especially easy if the students can't voice their discretions publically. I don't think a single university publically displays the stats of student reviews after a semester with a prof. The profs can complain all they want but in the long run it's the students who will suffer.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
I have some real sympathy for being able to "shop" online to get info about courses and teachers. But I'm a college prof myself, and have sat on a number of personnel committees, and have read a *lot* of student comments over the years. Many of those comments - perhaps most - are intelligent, or plausible, or reasonable expressions of feelings. Sometimes more than one of these. But sometimes they are simply irresponsible - 'get another career,' 'you shouldn't be allowed to teach anyone, anywere,'and sadly, a lot of 'you #@$$!, get #%&*$#.' Insults, psychiatric diagnoses, speculations about home life - these are rare, but not rare enough. It's bad enough that these go into personnel files and get read by peers and supervisors (yes, they really are, and they really matter). But at least these people understand what sorts of things, good and bad, students will say anonymously. Unmoderated posting of these things on the internet is a bad idea, personally damaging, and maybe harmful to careers.
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.
Hmm, TeacherReviews.com? I'M ON THERE?!?!?!!?!?
WHAT? WHAT? I'M NOT A BIOPOLAR PARANOID SCHITZOPHRENIC! I KNOW, I'LL SUE THEM!
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?
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suwain_2
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
That's not insightful. Read what he said... even after removing the offending content the professor still threatened a lawsuit.
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.
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.
There already is such a system.
It's called "grades."
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.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
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.
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)
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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=
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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.
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My first time being slashdotted and I was off watching The Daily Show...
As a psychologist, and an instructor at a university, I can sympathize with both (1) the students who want to evaluate potential courses, and (2) instructors who not only have to deal with problematic students, but sometimes are actually pressured to kiss their ass.
.5 who can't accept blame for the fact they failed all their classes because they didn't study for whatever reason. When those students begin to make false statements about professors, those statements should be scrutinized, because they affect the life of someone else.
Courses and professors are not simply to be rated and "consumed" based on how pleased you are with your performance in a class. That's not to say professors shouldn't be evaluated, but rather, that student ratings shouldn't be the primary means of doing so. There is a conflict of interest inherent in student ratings: students who perform poorly, who are required to take a class, etc. tend to rate professors lower than individuals who perform well or who are taking the course as an elective. This has nothing to do with the professor--it has everything to do with a student blaming a professor for their own performance problems.
There is a disturbing trend among universities, possibly fading, possibly not, to strive toward a product-consumer model, where students are the consumers, and the university is the producer. A more appropriate model to aim for is one in which both students and professors are seen as producers, and the university community is the consumer, so to speak. Students should go to a university to contribute, not to consume. The same should be said for professors.
Having said all this, I don't in general have a problem with a website, forum, or whatever, publishing student ratings of courses. Students talk about classes anyway, and these sorts of things just open up the flow of communication. I also see plenty of colleagues who can't teach a damn, and should probably be forced to reconsider the abuse they give to students.
If a student really did post something about a professor being a "paranoid schizophrenic," fine, but then someone should be held liable for, well, libel, because it's not a label that should be taken lightly (whoa--that's some sort of inchoate tongue-twister). As other posts have noted, there ARE young professors trying to get tenure, whose lives ARE affected by disgruntled students with a GPA of
I hope this website stays running, but I also hope that whoever runs it realizes that they need to be responsible for the things that appear on their website. If they put this stuff up, fine, but they should be prepared for lawsuits surrounding exactly these sorts of things. I also think that whoever visits these sorts of sites thinks long and hard about why they are seeking out this information, and why they are seeking an education.
There have been suggestions of moderated ratings and that sort of thing. It's not such a bad idea. Perhaps appropriate moderations should be done in exactly the same way that universities and professors are asked to consider ratings? E.g., that ratings be weighted lower if they are coming from individuals with lower GPAs, lower grades in the class, or if they are not taking the course as an elective? There would be problems in this in a non-university site, because you would have no way of verifying grades, but ideally, this is the way it could be done. Allow other professors to moderate them? Who knows. I guess it could be done.