UNC Mirror

Issue date: 11/26/07 Section: News

Although traditionally it has been the students making grades in the classrooms, online networking Web sites and other dotcoms are offering students a chance to tell their peers if certain professors are making the cut.

 Myspace.com gives its members the opportunity to grade their professors. After looking up their school, students can access a professor's sight or create a profile for a not-yet-rated professor. Students can then give letter grades on how fair a teacher is, how hard their tests are and overall performance. Additional comments are also encouraged.

 RateMyProfessors.com is another site that allows students to evaluate some major factors in a professor's performance and leave comments with additional information for their peers. Currently there are 442 professors rated on the Web site for the University of Northern Colorado. 

Although some professors at UNC were unaware that sites like these existed, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication Dale Edwards was not. 

"I have not looked for myself," Edwards said. "I looked for a fellow professor while I was at the University of North Carolina." 

Edwards does not see any harm in students being able to rate professors online because it just provides more widespread coverage than word of mouth already does, but he does question the reliability of such ratings.

 "My experience with another service suggests that comments come from students who really like the class or who have had a negative experience with the professor," Edwards said. "Neither of them makes for an unbiased viewpoint."

 Ali Toth, a junior psychology major at UNC, shares the same opinion as Edwards.  Although she has visited the sites, she does not put much trust in them and prefers to find a more reliable source to consult on a professor's performance.

"Students who go out of their way to rate a professor negatively aren't very reliable," Toth said. "If you want an honest opinion, I think you are better off talking to an upperclassmen or someone in your major." 

Other students at UNC know all about the sites that allow students to rate their professors and have used them to help choose their professors.

Katelyn Teel, a freshman business administration major, looked online to see what grades her professors were getting before she took them for fall semester. When asked about the reliability of such ratings, Teel said it depends on the situation.

"I strongly disagree with some ratings," Teel said. "But overall, a lot of good ratings or a lot of bad ones is a pretty reliable sign of how a professor is."

 Teel has never posted a rating for a professor but is considering it because she wants to help out her peers.

 MySpace.com and RateMyProfessors.com are just a couple of the many Web sites available to students looking to find ratings on their professors.

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