Scott Jaschik, the editor of the splendid Inside Higher Ed, called me up yesterday to chat about the latest Ratemyprofessors wrinkle: photos. His article appears this morning, and begins:
There’s a new reason to worry about students with cell phones in your classes. RateMyProfessors.com, the Web site whose popularity with students is matched by the grief it gives professors, has launched a new feature, encouraging students to shoot photographs of their faculty members and to post them along with the anonymous ratings of professors.
Think RateMyProfessors is going to ask your permission to post a photograph that you may not even know was taken (camera phones are being recommended to students)? Of course not, although RateMyProfessor asserts that it has other quality control mechanisms in place.
In the 48 hours since RateMyProfessors posted information about this new service on its site, it has received more than 1,200 photographs of professors and it is in the process of reviewing and uploading them.
Well, my students know that using their cell phone in class to take pictures, text-message, or talk to friends will result in their names being stricken from the Lamb’s Book of Life. I have connections, you know! Still, I am sure someone could snap my pic surreptitiously. I do note that someone has already uploaded a picture for me on RMP — they simply took the photo from this blog, which I don’t mind. But some of my pictures need to be seen in a certain context!
Jaschik kindly quotes me at length:
Hugo Schwyzer might seem like just the kind of professor who would like RateMyProfessors. A historian at Pasadena City College, he’s on the hottest list, has great ratings on RateMyProfessors, and has no hesitation about sharing life details or photographs — along with his philosophy and ruminations — online, at his blog.
Indeed Schwyzer said that he had high hopes for RateMyProfessors and thought it might provide a good source of anonymous feedback for him so he could improve his teaching. But he said that by asking students to send in photographs of professors, without a system to check first on whether the photos were taken with permission, it was clear that “the primary function is to humiliate.”
Schwyzer said he’s seen “the speciousness of the whole system” in recent weeks. He offended some men’s rights activists on his blog, and they responded by posting numerous critical comments on RateMyProfessors to bring down his scores. While some of those comments have been removed, Schwyzer said he witnessed “a remarkably detailed discussion of my appearance.”
To the extent RateMyProfessors could have served a valuable purpose, he said, it would have been about teaching and classroom performance. The non-scientific approach to those subjects and the increasing emphasis on physical appearance take away that potential, he added. By going with the photo feature, Schwyzer said, RateMyProfessors “loses whatever shreds of legitimacy it had.”
Meh. I agree that RMP is definitely a poor source of professor evaluation, and this probably takes it a notch lower, but I don’t regard it as a real menace of any sort, because I also think any student with a brain should be able to see that. Students exchange this kind of frivolous advice about their teachers all the time; when I was in college, I would hear about how Prof. X was a hottie - and though I might chuckle and nod, I still had enough sense in me to give that the non-regard it deserves when it came to picking courses. RMP just makes these exchanges more public and impersonal.
I’m an adult college student and I do take the time to carefully rate my professors at RMP. Yes, the quality of the ratings there is highly variable, but if a person goes there seeking actual information, I want it to be provided.
We also do student evaluations at school (the bane of professors everywhere, as I understand it), but unless you specifically go request to see them, all you can get, as a student, is the average and standard deviation of student responses on a few items.
While some of those comments have been removed, Schwyzer said he witnessed “a remarkably detailed discussion of my appearance.”
My first thought on reading this was: WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF BEING A FEMALE !!! But then I had to think that you, Hugo, are just about the LAST person who needs to be reminded to this truth.
But you still get to feel what it FEELS like to find your appearance being the MAIN THING. Isn’t it creepy?
My school has a detailed survey which students use to rate their overall experience in each course, and that data is accessible to any student.
It works pretty well because only students get to vote, and they only get to vote once, and it’s based on teaching quality, fairness, organization, not anything frivolous. Proffessors that do well on these student evaluations take pride in them, and in my experience those ratings are pretty accurate. It’s a research university, and there’s a lot of profs who barely put any effort into teaching at all, so the student evaluations can be really helpful.
The only downside is the survey used to be mandatory, and now it’s not, so you can’t get as good information. Nonetheless, I think every school (or better yet, student unions!) should do similar evaluations. Otherwise you could end up in the class of the guy who’s too busy getting published to actually teach you anything.