Rate my professor

The end of the semester looms just in sight. Stress is palpable among the student body, even as next semester's registration begins. The familiar professor evaluations are now making the rounds from classroom to classroom. "Each semester we use a paper and pencil format," said Weber State University History Department Chair Susan Matt, "and faculty pass them out, leave the room, and a student gathers them up and brings them to the secretary of the department. That way they are kept confidential." Many students never see or hear about that evaluation after it leaves their hands. Whether or not the evaluation even makes a difference is an item of some debate. "Honestly I don't think the professor evaluations are that helpful," said Erica Langer, a WSU education major. "Most of the time students are going through it just trying to get it done." On RateMyProfessor.com, students have an outlet to vent and voice opinions on the professor where other students can see. Growing in popularity as a Web site, with offshoots and copycat versions, students are beginning to depend on RateMyProfessor.com for the next semester's class registration. The accuracy of these sites is always under scrutiny, deemed questionable at best. "The thing about Ratemyprofessor.com," Matt said, "is it attracts people who loved the class or really hated it to log in create an account and rate a professor. You sort of have to have an agenda when you use the site; there is no middle ground. "The in-class evaluations are better because you are surveying a lot of students, not just ones with strong preferences towards a particular professor." Students can see for themselves the site's "6,000 schools, 1 million professors, 6 million opinions" in action. Running since 1999, RateMyProfessor.com is no new concept, offering dirt on professors in the U.S., England, Canada and Wales. Days of asking around about professor so-and-so are gone, replaced with the go-to technology of the Internet. "I've heard from some students that they select their classes off of Ratemyprofessor.com," said WSU Anthropology Professor Stephen Niedzwiecki. "I don't know how true that is or not because there are so many students who don't even know about it." Though the site does experience the occasional setback in credibility; a ranting, irate student over a bad grade, or the outright oddity that loved the course a little too much; there are advantages on knowing what to expect from each professor. "It's a well-known fact that a lot of professors make up their own Ratemyprofessor.com entries," Niedzwiecki said. "If the ratings corresponded well with my reviews from my students I would take them very seriously." WSU currently has 643 professors ranked on RateMyProfessor.com of the total 838 full- and part-time currently working. Since the Web site's creation, many spin-off versions of the site have been created. On Myspace.com there is a very popular rating system for WSU professors through their "find a school" link. WSU alone has 15,565 total members. "I look at the overall ratings," said Casey Evans, a WSU freshman, "and then I look at how many people rated them. If it's a large scale of graders and they have a low score, I won't take their course. I just think it's a good tool to let yourself know what you are getting into. You can't pinpoint it, but you can get the general idea."