On the website RateMyProfessors.com (RMP), a page delineates the focus and purpose of the site. Specifically, the web-based student evaluation site is described as follows:
RateMyProfessors.com is built for college students, by college students. Choosing the best courses and professors is a rite of passage for every student, and connecting with peers on the site has become a key way for millions of students to navigate this process. The site does what students have been doing forever—checking in with each other—their friends, their brothers, their sisters, their classmates—to figure out who’s a great professor and who’s one you might want to avoid (RateMyProfessors.com 2019).
This begs the question of what counts as a “great professor”? It goes without saying that students’ criteria for determining “greatness” among college teaching faculty is quite different from both college administrators’ criteria and college faculty members’ own criteria. There clearly is no consensus on what “effective teaching” is. Ultimately, though, it is students’ opinions that matter the most. After all, the evaluations are called “student evaluations of teaching” (SET) for a reason, and student satisfaction with the instructor is the factor that institutions of higher learning consider when evaluating a college faculty member’s teaching effectiveness. However, the reliance on student evaluations exclusively raises numerous challenges.
1.1 Student Evaluations of Teaching
Even through there is no consensus on what constitutes “effective teaching,” student evaluations remain popular because of the ease in which to administer the instrument: students simply fill out pre-set forms that require little class time. Not only is the data collection easy, but the ease extends to the presentation and interpretation of the data (Hornstein 2017).
In the 1970s, student evaluations of teaching were designed to inform and improve the quality of teaching. Since then, however, they have been used as “summative evaluation”—that is, what Hornstein (2017) describes as a summing up of overall teaching performance for personnel decisions (tenure and promotion). The interpretations of the student evaluations are fraught with problems, however. For one, the response sets are categorical (e.g., excellent, good, fair, and poor), but the presentations and interpretations assume continuous interval (numeric)-level scales for categories that really are discrete categories. Compounding the matter is that few administrators are trained to interpret the data from student evaluations of teaching. Oftentimes, administrators will simply compare scores against the mean scores and assume that scores below the mean are bad and scores above the mean are good. Administrators further assume—indeed they expect—that all teaching faculty should score above average in all categories (Hornstein 2017).
The quantitative nature of the student ratings makes it seem as though the student evaluations are objective when the reality is that student evaluations are not measuring teaching effectiveness; rather, they are measuring something else entirely: student satisfaction with the instructor/instruction/class. Clayson (2009) maintained that if good instruction correlated positively with the amount of learning that took place, then learning and the evaluations should be validly related to each other. The literatures, however, are mixed on such a finding, and the relationship between high scores on the student evaluations and actual learning appears to be situational, and not applicable to all teachers, academic disciplines, or levels of instruction. Clayson concluded that if there were a more objective measurement of learning, then learning would be less likely to be related to the evaluations.
1.2 Down the Web-Based Teaching Evaluation Hole: Confronting RateMyProfessors.com
The various forms of “official” or standardized student evaluations that institutions of higher learning use are already fraught with much controversy. College students’ reliance on anonymous, unmoderated web-based evaluations, however, only exacerbates the controversy. In Chap. 3, where I discuss the methodology for the current study, I address many of the challenges and dilemmas associated with public, online student evaluations of teaching.
The data source at the center of this study is RateMyProfessors.com. RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is the most well-known of the web-based evaluation sites where students can rate college faculty and post comments about specific faculty. RMP allows college students to publicly rate college professors on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 representing the highest rating. Students are able to rate professors on a variety of criteria, including helpfulness and easiness. The scores are averaged to produce an overall quality rating. In addition to the quantitative ratings, students also are permitted to post comments about the professor and to tag the professor with brief descriptors.
As of September 2018, my overall quality rating on RateMyProfessors.com is 3.7 out of 5 (1 = lowest and 5 = highest quality). My difficulty rating is 3.5 out of 5 (1 = least difficult and 5 = most difficult).
Tags included for me include: tough grader (N = 17), get ready to read (14), gives good feedback (7), Skip class? You won’t pass (6), clear grading criteria (6), participation matters (5), lots of homework (5), so many papers (3), extra credit (2), accessible outside class (2), respected (2), lecture heavy (2), amazing lectures (1), and caring (1).
Critical comments include the following:
She was a harsh grader.Too much work. Hard grader.Do not recommend. Spent more time in this class than other level 400 classes. Tests are difficult. Tough grader. Felt as if she expected far too much of people for an elective course.This professor has been by far the hardest I have had. I felt like this was A LOT of work for an online class. She is not very clear with her questions on assignments, also be prepared to read every day/night. Will not negotiate with you about grade. Expects WAY too much from her students, especially an online course. Save yourself.Has been EXTREMELY rude in two of the three messages she has sent to me (Online class). If you don’t know something, don’t bother asking her unless you want to feel like garbage. Sent my anxiety through the roof.Gives an insane amount of assignments for an online class. Put more work into this elective class than I did my classes for my major.Her assignments are long and tedious and she doesn’t give you much room for creativity.If you’re planning on taking her as an elective be aware that you’re going to have to put in a lot of effort for long-term projects. She also assigns readings but she doesn’t go over them. Don’t be surprised if it’s on the test.
I received many comments that I am a “hard grader,” which would largely explain my less-than-stellar overall quality rating on RMP. The assessment of an instructor as a “hard grader” usually corresponds to low(er) ratings. The negative association between academic rigor and evaluation scores is well documented in the literatures. Clayson (2009) even maintained that “[s]tudents seem to associate rigor with negative instructor characteristics that override positive learning relationships” (p. 26).
The frequent “hard grader” comments, however, likely originate from students who are not used to rigorous classes. They are more accustomed to classes and instructors that deliver “easy A’s.” A cursory scan of my gradebooks in the various courses I teach, moreover, suggests that a good number of students do earn A’s and B’s, and very few students end up failing or receiving D’s. Yet, based on the RMP comments, invariably it is the low-performing students who are most vocal in their complaints on the public web-based evaluation site.
I also regularly teach six-week online courses. These are accelerated courses with a semester’s materials compacted into six weeks. I explicitly include notes on the online platform warning students to expect daily reading assignments, as this was an accelerated six-week course. Some students, however, do not understand why daily work is required; in fact, they may resent it, leading to less-than-positive comments and ratings on RMP.
In other cases, evaluations of my manners, indicated by the student who claimed I was “rude” in email messages, occur when I call out students. For this particular comment, the student had emailed me numerous times asking a very simple question: Where were the readings? I had mentioned to this student that the reading locations were indicated in various areas of the web-based platform and that the location also was specified on the actual course syllabus. Even more specifically, I reminded the student that the reading assignments were in one of two places only: either as chapters in the actual physical copy of the textbook or else they were posted in a file on the online platform as pdf documents. Yet, even after relaying this more than once, the student continued to email me and claimed that she could not find the readings. I became impatient and curt after the fourth or so email and replied something to the effect of: “The readings are in one of two locations—in the textbook or else on [the web-based platform]. I’m not sure how you are not understanding my emails and instructions.”
Usually I am quite patient with student email inquiries. A student would have to irritate me greatly for me to retort with a brusque reply. Yes, I was curt and perhaps a little impatient with the above student, but these are adults who supposedly have college habits and higher-level cognitive skills. This student, however, demonstrated that she was unable to follow even the simplest of directions, including multiple reminders of such directions. I expect college students to have college-level abilities, not remedial abilities or abilities that suggest that they are less than high-school level. I also expect college students to be able to function independently and competently when it comes to basic tasks and habits.
Do the RMP comments bother me? I admit that I find certain comments grating, particularly when the comments do not provide the full context and omit relevant information, but I also find certain students—rather, certain student habits and behaviors—irritating. In the end, I take the RMP ratings and comments with a grain of salt, as I am fully aware of the validity issues associated with them. On the other hand, I also try to take some of the comments seriously, as they may provide lessons on how to improve my instructional style.
The above commentaries by students are quite benign when compared to other comments of faculty posted on RMP. I have read absolutely vicious and slanderous comments of faculty. I also have read many sexist, racist, ageist, and homophobic comments. I am horrified by these comments and shudder at the thought of reading comments that lambaste my race and ethnicity, sex, weight, height, hairstyle, and other physical-appearance markers that I did not realize influenced student evaluations of their course instructors.
I try my best to be dutiful and diligent when it comes to teaching. I am by no means perfect, or even close to it. Teaching is a work in progress. Course content always needs updating, and teaching methods always need revisions. And, sometimes, teaching styles and personalities need an overhaul, however difficult those changes might be.
Most college faculty begin teaching sometime during graduate school. They typically serve as teaching assistants to faculty at their graduate institution. The teaching assistantship duties may vary from simply grading exams and assignments to grading and organizing and leading discussion sections. The latter context is where graduate students develop their teaching skills. And they do so independently, usually with little or no guidance from the faculty for whom they serve as a teaching assistant.
Learning how to teach is a skill that one acquires alone. Although an inexperienced instructor may model his or her teaching style on faculty mentors, mimicking another faculty’s style and/or even course content simply will not work because it is not organic. Through trial and error, each teacher figures out the strengths and weaknesses of his/her teaching style, course content, and so forth.
Presentation also matters. In many ways, teaching involves a dramaturgical (Goffman 1959) and even dramatic performance by the course instructor. Through a display of competence and passion and enthusiasm, an instructor is able to impart to students not just knowledge but interest in the subject. The instructor’s facilitation of lively interaction between faculty and students and among the students also helps pique student interest in the course. Then, of course, are personality traits that help facilitate (or not) t...