Some observers such as your servant have been dismissed for reading and relating the anonymous reviews found on Rate My Professors.com. The harshest critics of these ratings, perhaps not too surprisingly, tend to be professors.
Thus it comes as a bit of a surprise to find a fairly authoritative university study which found that the RMPs tend to be accurate. “At the same time as some faculty committees and corporations are appealing to the use of online ratings from RateMyProfessors.com to inform promotion decisions and nationwide university rankings, others are derogating the site as an unreliable source of idiosyncratic student ratings and commentary,” April Bleske-Rechek and Amber Fritsch write in study which appeared in the November 2011 issue of Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, “a peer-reviewed electronic journal.”
Bleske-Rechek is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. “Contrary to the assumption that students’ ratings are unreliable, variance in students’ ratings about a given instructor was similar across number of raters, with 10 raters showing the same degree of consensus as 50 or more raters,” she writes. “Students showed the most consensus about instructors who were among the top third of the distribution in quality, and this effect occurred even among instructors rated as the most difficult.”
“Taken alongside other investigations of RateMyProfessors.com and the broad literature on student evaluations of teaching, our findings suggest that students who use RateMyProfessors.com are likely providing each other with useful information about quality of instruction.”
Fritsh is a student at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. It should be noted that Bleske-Rechek’s RMPs are overwhelmingly spectacular.
Though her students go on at length about her, one neatly sums up all their hosannas: “April kicks ass.”
In her willingness to tackle conventional wisdom, she does indeed do just that. A few years back, she unnerved a Pasadena City College professor with her skepticism about married men and women having friends of the opposite gender. “Wary husbands and wives have an uneasy sense of the temptations out there, even if they trust their spouses,” Hugo Schwyzer, a professor of history and gender studies at Pasadena City College, claims that she stated.
“It’s like when your teenage daughter goes to a concert dressed like a slut,” says Bleske-Rechek. “She says, ‘I’m not going to do anything.’ And her father says, ‘It’s not you I’m worried about.’”
As for Hugo, his students on RMP claim he is a:
- “Former seminary student turned sex and gender prof!”
- “The walking embodiment of the smug liberal elitist” and a
- “Great lecturer but don’t bother asking him for help, especially if your [sic]a guy.”
And those are characterizations gleaned from his favorable ratings.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
