That sounds like a good recipe for popularity contest and hollywoodization of teaching - idiots who cannot act/teach being propelled to the status of celebrity by popularity ratings and ticket sales. Some possibilities of this pseudo-democratic idiocy: - religious right or republicans organize a campaign to purge a 'pc' instructor, they pose as students and spam the site with negative evaluations - which cannot be verified because of anonymity - an instructor wants to become an intellectual celebrity - s/he spams the site with positive evaluations of his/her course, again impossible toverify because of anonymity. Question: how is this diffrent from the 'peer review' process that guides much of academic publishing? Is not it the same kind of crap behind a pseudo-democratic strorefront? wojtek >NY Times, September 1, 1999 > >To Professors' Dismay, Ratings by Students Go Online > >By IAN ZACK > >John Moriarty, a 21-year-old business major at the University of Texas, was >eager to enroll in a marketing course whose "syllabus sounded really >intriguing." > >But first, like many collegians, he sat down at his computer, logged on to >the Internet and availed himself of a new online resource: course >evaluations written anonymously by other students. > >The critiques, in the style of brief movie reviews, said the professor in >question was distant, his research outdated and his lectures uninspiring. >And if the mini-commentaries were not blunt enough, the numerical ratings >were, hovering around 2 on a scale of 1 to 10. > >"I thought, 'Oh, boy, that's probably not a good course to take,' " >Moriarity recalled. > >And so it goes at colleges across the country. As students sign up for fall >classes, they are turning the tables on the teachers who have long held >sway over their grade point averages and job prospects. > >Emboldened by the communal power and the democratic ethos of cyberspace, >they are heading to Web sites where they can lambaste professors they deem >poor, sing the praises of those they like and scout out courses before >adding them to their schedules. . . > >http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/biztech/articles/01eval.html > > >Go to http://www.collegestudent.com/national/rateclasses/ for student >ratings of courses > > >Louis Proyect > >(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
