I am currently taking 2 night classes at my university and am a bit disappointed at the teachers I am stuck with. Unfortunately, I am locked into the classes because of time and requirements, but any student would surely appreciate a way to judge and compare teachers for each class they need to take before having to find out the hard way.

I suggest each college or university organize an online Teacher Rating System whereby students may sign in and review any teachers whose classes they might have taken. I envision this might be similar to the way www.epinions.com works. Each teacher would be listed with all class information. The information would be organized in an online database which can be browsed through by anyone and contributed to by any student. Each student would be allowed to write one review for each teacher for each class. If a teacher teaches multiple classes, a separate listing would be available for each class.

Students would be able to give the teachers overall ratings as a number of stars (maximum would be 5 stars). They could also write in as much detail as they wish, all about the experience they had in the class, providing things other students would be interested in, like teaching style, demeanor, foreign accents, amount of homework assignments given, test experience, etc.

I think this would be the best way to motivate teachers to be more popular among students, as well.
-- XSarenkaX, Sep 24 2002

My Epinions Ratings http://www.epinions.../show_~View_Profile
An example of the format I'd like to see applied to this idea [XSarenkaX, Sep 24 2002]

My Epinions Ratings http://www.epinions.../show_~View_Profile
An example of the format I'd like to see applied to this idea [XSarenkaX, Oct 04 2004]

RateMyProfessors.com http://www.ratemyprofessors.com
Someone's baked my idea! [XSarenkaX, Oct 04 2004]

University of Toronto's ASSU Anti-Calendar http://www.campusli...n_anticalendar.html
Low-tech versions have been around for decades. [Monkfish, Oct 04 2004]

CollegeDude http://www.ratetheteacher.com
A+++ excellent service, great ratings and reviews. sign up, its the best site of this type. your idea was baked already aparently. [collegedude, Oct 04 2004]

I wonder if there are libel issues on something like this? By this I mean could a teacher sue a student for a negative review? They may not win (especially if the review is found to be truthful) but the threat of lawsuits are effective deterrents.

Also, I wonder if professors could require students to agree, in a legally binding way, not to ever write such reviews as a condition of taking classes from them.
-- bristolz, Sep 24 2002


There's something very obsessive about people who wish to be rated, and i don't think its too good an idea to tell people that they are 'one star'. It kind of gives the impression that they aren't really worth that much in terms of human life, and could lead to depression and what-not.
-- [ sctld ], Sep 24 2002


Hm, I guess it would suck to be rated poorly, but that should motivate them to do better, not to commit suicide or something. Besides, my school already implements a system of collecting anonymous reviews of teachers/classes at the end of the semesters already. The only difference is that the results are kept private.

But that information is useful not only to the professors' superiors, for review purposes, but to students who wish to take their classes. Why keep it secret? If that anonymously collected info was simply logged into a database as statistical info, even that might help. Publish it all, though, I say.
-- XSarenkaX, Sep 24 2002


As a former instructor, I was rated on my performance weekly. Frankly, it's not that difficult to get good reviews; so much so, in fact, that poor reviews tend to show up as blips on the radar and reflect more on the student than the instructor. It would take a large number of bad reviews from a wide sampling of students to truly indicate a bad teacher, so this might work.
-- phoenix, Sep 24 2002


Can't see this as being defamatory, provided the comments are limited to criticism/praise of the teaching teacher. Fair comment, see? There'd need to be moderation to ensure that the content did not exceed these boundaries.

Also popularity != teaching ability.

Croissant, though.
-- calum, Sep 24 2002


I just found out this week on the news that there is a website that exists that does just what I wished for here. (See link.) But it's kinda slow lately and has a tendency to not be able to be displayed on my screen a lot, for some reason. (Perhaps this is temporarily due to recent media popularity - I spotted a blurb on CNN the other day - or recent snowy weather.)

It's a database of professors at universities across the country, with ratings by anonymous students. Teachers' names can be added and/or corrected and they are given ratings (on a scale 5)on difficulty of the class and a couple other relevant characteristics. A short field is given for other comments as well.
-- XSarenkaX, Feb 18 2003


Well it seems that your idea has been baked already. exactly what u described above, even the 5 star rating, is avalilble at http://www.ratetheteacher.com, i guess they read your mind and made their site. maybe you should e-mail them and ask for some royalties (:-D).
-- mrguy, Jun 05 2003


I rate this idea as an D. The low grade is not for it's content (though it's been baked for at least 5 years), but because of the links. XS, please add a http:// in front of your link. Eassay, your link is broken, unless you meant ratemyteacher, in which case collagedude had it covered. Guy, collagedude already posted this link.
-- Worldgineer, Jun 05 2003


[Worldgineer], I fixed my link (thanks) and deleted the other redundant ones. Care to re-grade?
-- XSarenkaX, Sep 17 2003


B(un). (No A's for a regrade)
-- Worldgineer, Sep 17 2003


Baked, they already do this at my University. However, the lectures hand you a sheet at the end of their until they teach and you fill it in and they are all handed directly to the head of that particualr school. The lecturer doesn't get to read them until exams are over and it's totaly anonymous, so if you did bag out your lecturer, he/she will be none the wiser.
-- Mind_Boggle, Sep 17 2003


I think teacher evaluations are common at colleges and universities - my school does this, too. However, their shortcoming is the privacy of the feedback - that is, they help department heads do their reviews of professors, but they DON'T help other students choose their courses based on the reviews of the professors. The basis of this idea is that the feedback is done by students, for students.
-- XSarenkaX, Sep 18 2003


At my uni there was a lecturer that everyone wrote down that he was bad and couldn't lecture for peanuts. Next year, the lecturer was all of a sudden mysteriously better and started to use pictures and diagrams in his lecture and they actually started to become interesting.
-- Mind_Boggle, Sep 18 2003



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