Important things to consider:

The mechanics of online rating:

It was found that students relied more on the written portions of the ratings and basically ignored the numerical portion (Kindred, Mohammed). However, the easiness scale was given the most attention. The graphics also can skew a perception. The smiley faces are hard to ignore and are good at shaping a first impression for the teacher and the course.  If the teacher has more “angry” faces as opposed to “smiley” faces, then a student may be turned off from the teacher right away (Kindred, Mohammed).

This method could be applied to any rating system. For example, a customer will eat a restaurant with four stars before choosing to dine at a place with only two stars. The stars are the equivalent of the face in this situation. Also like with any other rating system, the more ratings a professor receives, the more credibility their rating is assigned. This idea can be found on the popular shopping site, Ebay. If a seller has a high score which was obtained through the ratings of many people, then buyers are more likely to purchase items from them. If a seller has a high score but only two people have rated them, their credibility is not as convincing. This proves that students are more likely to trust ratings which were supported by many other students as well.

Also it is important to remember that online rating sites are normal for everything from hotels to restaurants, allowing consumers to rave or rage about businesses (Solnik). Therefore the way in which students rate professors online, will not dramatically stray from the norms of any other online rating system and should not be presented with any concerns that other sites wouldn’t face.

 

Similar sites:

PickAProf.com  is available on 51 college campuses including Florida State and University of Colorado (Lewin). It has 88,000 professors and includes over 11 million reviews (PickAProf.com). Student governments can pay about $5,000 to $10,000 a year for the service. The site allows students to make their schedule, read course descriptions, reading lists and biographical material that their professors have posted. The site also shows a professors grade distribution in past classes.

It even goes as far as to show bar graphs of the grading history for each individual professor (Stern). Co-Founder John Cunningham stated that the reason behind the site was to make information which was normally kept from students, more accessible and readily available. Each student pays five dollars a semester to view the information (Reid). Although John Swapceinski, doesn’t earn a profit for his site, his vision was a similar one.

Professorperformance.com consists of over 1700 colleges and universities along with 21,972 professors (Professorperformance.com). Although the site is mainly meant for students, it speaks to professors directly.  The site has a page specifically for educators and encourages them to contact the site with any questions. Out of all their ratings, 70% percent were positive (Giegerich).

This site is similar to ratemyprofessors.com because it allows users to post comments, however the method of rating is different. Professors are graded on “coolness, ease and worth.” Also the grading scale is letter values not numbers.

Ratemyteacher.com is a site meant for rating high school teachers. It is the sister site of ratemyprofessors.com. It has over 9 million ratings and includes 53, 000 schools (ratemyteachers.com). The rating system is the same only the users are not asked to list which course they are rating. Also ratemyteacher.com gives teachers a chance to fight back or thank their students by creating their own accounts.

 

Surveys which schools give:

There has been speculation that the online ratings are the same as critiques done by students during class time at the end of every semester. Kasey Kerber, the founder of ProfessorPerformance.com said that, “Our site is no different from the evaluations provided at the end of the semester. The only difference is that students aren’t allowed to see those evaluations” (Giegrich).

This information is used by colleges to determine how good of a job professors are doing. Although this information can shape a professor’s career, it is not shared with the students. One student from Maryland commented that “But because our school has been unwilling to make the information and evaluations available to us, and because we feel that the students want the information so badly, we went to Pick-A-Prof” (Lewin). Basically because student’s aren’t being given the results of the schools’ evaluations, they are creating their own.