Professor's Blog Takes on Professor Ratings Website
Posted on January 20, 2006
The Digital Collegian reports that a college professor has launched a blog called Rate Your Students in response to the RateMyProfessors.com website. The anonymous college professor told the Digital Collegian that he decided to start the blog after a colleague received a review on RateMyProfessor.com that he thought was slanderous and unfair.
The Professor said he started the site after a colleague was rated poorly on RateMyProfessor.com.The Rate Your Students blog includes commentary about education and feedback from professors rating or discussing their students."He was a great teacher with a family and received slanderous and homophobic comments," he said. "He was embarrassed and lost a little of his spirit."
The Professor said RateMyProfessor.com is a car-wreck of information and character assassination because the site does not prevent students from rating teachers at schools outside of their own.
"If you go to Penn State, you should only be permitted to rate Penn State professors," he said.
Besides posting grievances of professors and retorts from students, the site also allows professors to write reviews of students, which remain unnamed.RateMyProfessor.com is a very active website. They claim 4,200,000 ratings for professors from 5242 schools. The site itself admits that not all professors are happy about the website.A history professor in Indiana, who submitted a summary review of several students referred to with single initials, wrote, "Avoid this student if you can. She spends more on eyeliner than she does on textbooks. She wears more face powder than a 60-year-old stripper. She believes she's destined for greatness. She's destined to work at a laundromat."
What do teachers think of this site?The Professor's anonymous blog gives professors a venue for their complaints. Turnabout is fair play on the blogosphere college kids.
Well, that depends on the teacher!! We get a lot of emails from teachers telling us they like the site, and we've even had some telling us how the site has helped them. We also get some pretty hateful emails telling us how inappropriate the site is, how they are going to shut us down, etc.