University should be more transparent with course and professor evaluations

University+should+be+more+transparent+with+course+and+professor+evaluations

By Thaddeus Chatto

 Any college student will tell you that registering for classes can be a difficult time. 

One of the more commonly used tools for registering for classes is referring to ratemyprofessors.com 

Students can give ratings to their university’s professors on this website and it claims to be “built for college students, by college students.” 

According to the website, ratemyprofessors.com is the largest online outlet for professor ratings. The user-generated content makes the website the most trafficked site “for quickly researching and rating professors” across the United States.  

However, I don’t think relying on Ratemyprofessors.com is always a safe bet for registering classes. The information on the website can be helpful for students wanting quick and informal feedback on the professors of their potential courses. 

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But the ratings of professors seem to only take certain aspects into consideration such as a professor’s easiness, clarity and helpfulness. These limited categories don’t provide much validity to justify the ratings given. And the comments and ratings by some students can be irrelevant to a professor’s teaching ability such as indicating a professor’s “hotness.” 

For some reason, students can rate the “hotness” level of a professor on the website. Although not included in the overall quality rating, regardless, a teacher’s physical appearance should not have influence on his or her ability to educate students. But I guess if you want to take a class with the hottest professor on campus, you can find out who he or she is on the website. 

Ratemyprofessors.com can be helpful for those looking for a class to get an easy A, but it should be more than that. The idea of the website should be a tool for students to make informed decisions when picking classes with insightful comments and quantifiable data that students can see.    

I think the University should make its course evaluation data public and easily accessible to the student body population. It should be as accessible as ratemyprofessors.com is but with better quality of feedback and comments. 

Currently, the University has its own student course evaluation called the Instructor and Course Evaluation System, more commonly known as ICES forms. These evaluations allow students to give anonymous and honest feedback to professors and the overall quality of the class. 

Professors see the results of these evaluations, but they have the choice to have the results go public. According to the University’s Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning website, a professor must indicate whether he or she wants the results to be published by the Illinois Student Senate. The ICES data of some professors can be found on the Illinois Student Senate’s website under the ICES data tab. 

The problem is that I don’t think most students know about this because not all of the professor’s evaluations are on the website. The latest information available is from Spring 2012, where only 46 professors have their ICES forms available to view.  

Understandably, some professors don’t want their ICES evaluations data published to the public. These professors’ reputations may be tarnished publicly, simply because students bash them on ratemyprofessors.com, for reasons such as being tough graders or assigning large amounts of work. When, in reality, being a tough grader or assigning lots of work is subjective to the student: Perhaps the teachers’ instruction style and class structure don’t match the students’ learning methods.

But that doesn’t change the fact that some of the student evaluations on ratemyprofessors.com are not of high quality and the sample size of students’ ratings are small. 

For example, I looked at the most rated Communication professor here on campus and that title belongs to Robert McChesney, who teaches courses such as Political Economy and Communication. His overall quality is a 3.6 out of 5.0 and no student rated him as hot. But, the number of ratings is only 30. 

That is an incredibly small and biased sample of students considering he has taught courses here at the University for several years now. 

And anyone could add ratings to a professor on ratemyprofessors.com. Although I’m not sure how often it occurs, students that have not taken the course can also submit ratings. 

The University should look to Temple University, which recently created a new course-rating system. 

Temple has made public the course and teaching evaluations of all 2,500 professors and instructors at the university. The evaluations are accessible to freshmen and new transfer students as well as all other students who graded their professors during the spring semester. 

This University needs to make the data of ICES forms available to the students because it can give them better information to select classes. Instead of relying on ratemyprofessors.com, students should have a place to see statistically valid information of professors that match their educational desires.

Thaddeus is a senior in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @Thaddingham.