From: "Swisher, Bob" <bswisher@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Web Sites Offer Evaluations of Professors (Chron of Highe
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 09:54:22 -0500
Web Sites Offer Evaluations of Professors, for Better or Worse
By WENDY R. LEIBOWITZ
Web sites on which students can post evaluations of their professors are
proliferating, and there's not much the professors can do about it.
Some are large sites, such as collegestudent.com
(http://www.collegestudent.com), which invites critiques from students at
more than 400 universities. Some are small, such as grade-it.com
(http://www.grade-it.com/), which focuses on 13 universities located mainly
in the South and Southwest. Whatever their size or scope, they feature
uncensored, anonymous, and unsubstantiated comments that name professors at
specific universities.
"AAAAAAH! bad teacher!" reads a post at CollegePro-Net
(http://come.to/collegepronet). "i would NEVER recommend him as a teacher
for chem233 because it seemed he did not care for his students. He would
tell you to come to his office if you need help, but what he didn't tell you
was that he'd yell at you for asking a 'stupid' question." (CollegePro-Net's
site carries a warning label: "CollegePro-Net does not verify the accuracy
of any review.")
As is true elsewhere on the Internet, it's the most disgruntled individuals
who seem to be the most interested in taking the time to write. Some of
their criticisms appear to be well-founded, such as those that concern
professors who do not keep their office hours, or teaching assistants whose
English is incomprehensible. Other comments, however, focus on professors'
sexual proclivities, taste in clothing, or body odor.
The criticism can be harsh, personal, and -- on the Web -- oh-so-public. "I
believe in student evaluations," says Catharine R. Stimpson, dean of the
Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. "But this takes
student evaluations and exacerbates everything that's wrong with them.
It's the unbalanced judgment, the passing on of gossip and resentment.
"Unfiltered gossip is the bane of the Internet," Ms. Stimpson says. "I hope
that we develop Internet literacy so people learn how to take this with a
grain of salt."
While formal evaluations at the end of courses are a fixture at many college
and universities, the results generally circulate only within the
institutions. Similarly, students have always exchanged frank comments about
professors' teaching abilities or lack thereof -- at some institutions,
students have even published guidebooks to the faculty -- but these
exchanges also took place largely within the confines of the campus.
The comments posted on the Internet, on the other hand, are available to the
whole world. They could potentially affect a scholar's reputation in the
wider academic community, or even end up as the target of lawsuits -- if a
professor chooses to fight back, and can find someone to sue.
Professors say that one of the main problems with such sites is that most
let isolated comments stand for an entire class's worth of students, or even
for an entire institution. Generally, university-sponsored evaluations are
solicited from every student in a class, usually by distributing a form at
the end of a semester. On some campuses, summaries of the evaluations, or
the evaluation forms themselves, are then published, in paper form, with
studied judgments as well as off-the-cuff observations. A particularly harsh
evaluation is averaged out in the wash of other critiques.
But on the Web, anyone with an ax to grind is free to grind away. Many of
the evaluation sites are new, so most courses are represented by only one or
by a handful of comments, usually from someone who has suffered a negative
experience. There is no way to verify whether a student has posted more
than one comment using different names, or even whether the student took the
course or not. Thanks to the anonymity the Web sites promise, students could
go to a competing college's evaluation page and enter comments critical of
every professor at the institution.
On the other hand, student evaluations on the Web can be a helpful source of
information about the strongest and weakest instructors -- and are perhaps
the only source of such information for prospective students, who have no
way of obtaining on-campus guides.
At the University of California at Los Angeles, "student evaluations are not
available unless you go to the records office," says Eugene Volokh, a law
professor there. "You can do it, but it's not something that prospective
students will do." Students are paying good money for courses, he says, so
reliable evaluations are useful. They can steer students towards the best
professors.
"Perhaps on-line evaluations can be vehicles for the school to improve,"
says Mr. Volokh.
The positive features of on-line evaluations are evident. In electronic
form, evaluation information can be easily searched. The collegestudent.com
site splices the information in different ways, to allow students to see
results of an evaluation by respondents' gender, class year, or by course
difficulty. Some go back several years. A few professors have embraced the
inevitable, posting their student evaluations on their personal Web sites or
on sites provided for them by the university. Among them is Jose Llanes
(http://llanes.panam.edu/webeval.html), a professor of organization and
leadership at the University of Texas-Pan American.
One professor who received two poor comments on line is not surprised that
students have gone public with their evaluations. "I'm not surprised,
because everything is going on the Net," says Ammon Herman, a professor of
chemistry at the University of Maryland at College Park.
Evaluations at Mr. Herman's university are not standardized -- and possibly
not very helpful to students. "I was surprised to learn there's no standard
format," he says. "In chemistry, we use a short questionnaire. The
end-of-the-semester evaluations are not published. Most people writing
comments have an ax to grind one way or another."
U.C.L.A.'s Mr. Volokh also knows the sting of low evaluations, but does not
oppose their being posted on the Web.
"I find student evaluations very helpful, very important, and very
unpleasant and even painful to read," he says. "I'd be embarrassed to see
them posted on the Web, even if most of them were good, because I know that
some of them are bad."
A native of Ukraine, Mr. Volokh brings to his classroom the trait that seems
to provoke more anger in evaluations than any other: He speaks with a
foreign accent. "I tend to mumble a little, and sometimes speak too
quickly," he acknowledges. "When you're in the middle of an idea, you're not
focusing on your speech," he notes, adding that scholars are not hired for
their English proficiency.
Students may find that frustrating, he says, but their only recourse --
especially in the case of tenured professors -- may be making their
complaints public. "Sometimes universities talk about being more
consumer-focused, but they're not, in that sense, Wal-Mart."
Faculty members who try turning to the law probably can't stop students from
complaining -- no matter how wide their audience. If the comments are
opinions, strong free-speech traditions protect them. "There's no
constructive-criticism clause in the First Amendment," says Mr. Volokh.
It is unlikely that a Web site would face legal liability if libelous or
defamatory comments were posted as part of its course-evaluation service.
Sites, much like telephone companies, are shielded by specific Congressional
statute as passive transmitters of information. A student posting a comment
might face liability in an extreme case where a professor could demonstrate
that his or her career had suffered because of false remarks -- and could
find the student who made them.
Under some circumstances, it is easy to trace the electronic footprints of a
poster back to a specific computer or e-mail account. "You could subpoena
the [identifying] information about them from the Web-site operator," says
Mr. Volokh. "But they might not have the information. If they allow people
to submit comments from the Web using input boxes, they wouldn't have the
information," he notes, adding: "If I were the site, I'd try to set up
e-mail boxes that way."
And lawsuits are probably not advisable, anyway. "It wouldn't be good P.R.
for a university to sue people who claim to be their students," says Mr.
Volokh. "Just let it lie."
A lawsuit isn't the only way of responding, he says. "One of the ways to
fight anonymous criticism is to make clear that it's anonymous and
unaccountable. The site could be persuaded to put up a note saying, 'These
are anonymous posts and take them as you would anonymous gossip.'"
Taking matters into your own hands is the way of the Web, says Mr. Volokh.
"If the professor feels very strongly, he could ask some students to post
and say, 'I was in this person's class and he was a great teacher! And I'm
willing to sign my name to this.'"
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education