Rip wrote:
> I went to that website where schools and profs are evaluated. I
> joined up with ficticious information. Now, I could (as a
> pseudostudent) give my courses glowing evaluations while
> slamming the courses of peers that I do not like, i.e., there
> is no preventing a person from evaluating a professor whose
> course they were never in.
Since this is essentially what Marc indicated an instructor might do (in
the message I originally replied to), it tends to make the point that the
rights of the students to exercise their free speech on a web site of
their own choosing sans any interference by faculty are not being
respected.
You are, of course, quite right. You could give yourself glowing
evaluations while slamming the courses of your peers. You might note,
however, that you may have _already_ committed a felony with respect to
that site and that you would _definitely_ be commiting one if you were to
post such evaluations.
From the user agreement on collegestudent.com:
"This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the
laws of the State of Texas as applied to contracts made and performed
within Texas and you hereby irrevocably submit to the personal
jurisdiction of the courts (state and federal) located within Texas. The
provisions of this Agreement are separate and the un-enforceability of any
specific provision shall not affect the validity of any other provision
hereof."
The state of Texas (and every other state for that matter) defines the
act of knowingly and deliberately misrepresenting one's identity for the
purpose of securing goods or services as fraud, a class one felony. You
performed precisely this action in obtaining the services of
collegestudent.com, and thus if they were to choose to do so, they have
the right to prosecute you under Texas law (as a direct comparison, assume
you were trying to prove the point that "anyone can obtain a VISA card via
the web" and did so by filling out a completely false application for a
card on a website in which you lied about your income, employment, credit
worthiness, etc.--even if you never used that card, you would clearly have
committed fraud). Ignorance of this provision is no excuse incidently; by
applying for an account on collegestudent.com you legally agreed to be
bound by the terms of their user agreement, just as by breaking the seal
on a software package you agree to be legally bound by the user license.
While it is unlikely that they will prosecute under the current
circumstances (although if they felt it would serve to dissuade other
faculty members from interfering with their activities, they might well
choose to do so--_I_ would if I were their system administrator), if you
were to actually use the service in the manner you state possible, and the
faculty you maligned were to complain (thus compelling them to conduct a
log search to identify the poster who--again according to the user
agreement you bound yourself to by joining--is legally liable for any
damages), once they learned that the information was false (and learned
the ip number you connected from, thus identifying you), they would almost
certainly turn the case over to the State's Attorney General. If you live
in Texas and have some political influence there, you might talk your way
out of a conviction under such circumstances (although your career would
be ruined once it was made public), but if you don't, you would almost
certainly face conviction since most states are very protective of
enterprises operating within their boundries that are victims of fraud
perpetrated by non-residents.
I know you have no intention of actually following through on your
comments about posting false reviews, but it IS important to realize that
by your actions you have performed an act just as unethical (and more
illegal) than a student would perform by cheating on an exam or
plagiarizing a term paper. You have violeted the rights of what is clearly
a student oriented organization in the interest of "proving" your point, a
rather unreasonable act for a faculty member to perform.
> Add the fact that expected grade is the best predictor of course
> evaluations, and the fact that freshman have no frame of reference with
> which to grade college profs, and imho, the site is useless to
> anyone who is not naive.
Then why would an administrator or anyone other than a desparate student
CARE what was said? It can't be both ways; either the site is clearly
valueless and thus of no more legitimate concern to us as faculty members
than is the Weekly World News site (which, at least, offers material for
classroom discussion) or it _does_ pose a threat to our careers, in which
case it must have far more validity than you are asserting.
And, for the record, while expected grade may be the _best_ predictor of
course evaluations, it is far from being the only one--other concerns
_frequently_ outweigh it from the student perspective. The only time it is
strongly predictive is when course approach and content are relatively
similar between courses being evaluated (i.e., in a college with multiple
sections of a course sharing the same syllabus and structure). For
example: I teach what are without question the toughest courses (with the
heaviest workload) in my department (both the department chair and dean of
faculty have made that very clear), yet my evaluations are consistently at
the top and I have students who have taken up to five different courses
from me, knowing that at a minimum they will be required to pass five
quizzes and a final, perform four extended outside projects (taking up to
eight hours each to complete--plus the time required to write up their
reports), write four 8-10 page essays and a _substantive_ term paper, do
outside readings, make substantial use of the Internet as a research tool,
and participate in extensive in-class discussions (all in a 100 or 200
level course in a two-year college). If grade expectations (or workload!)
were the best predictor of my course evaluations, I would be receiving
reports that made the worst ones cited here from collegestudent.com look
positively radiant by comparison!
Overall, I suspect that the real problem many people here are having with
collegestudent.com is that it is something new and potentially threatening
to them. While some institutions have policies that permit students to
view the evaluations (or extracts from them) of current faculty, for the
first time those types of evaluations are being made available to the
general public--which converts it from a "private" matter to one that
offers potential embarassment. In addition, unlike a campus evaluation
where a student, regardless of assurances, may be fearful of presenting
his/her honest responses to an instructor's classroom skills out of a
concern that s/he will be identified in some manner and his/her academic
success will be compromised as a result (and if you don't think students
fear that, and, at least in part, base their evaluations on it, you don't
live in the real world), on collegestudent.com the student need have no
such concerns. S/he _knows_ that his/her statements are secure and will
not affect his/her future grades and thus s/he can speak freely and in a
manner that will not be identified with him/her by the administration. If,
in fact, grading is a concern, s/he can state so on the evaluation without
being identified as a student who is lazy or looking for slide courses
only (as could be the case on a campus based evaluation), and other
students--not administrators--will be the ones to read his/her
evaluations.
In reality, I suspect once the newness of the situation has passed, most
of us will find that it's "business as usual," and that the evaluations
are really no different than those we commonly receive on campus (perhaps
a bit more forthright, but still carrying essentially the same positive or
negative implications). Those few members who _do_ find themselves being
treated very harshly in such evaluations would profit a great deal more
from questioning the reason they are not well rated (i.e., from
_listening_ to the students) than from complaining about the site. Many
faculty tend to ignore or discount the importance of the student
evaluations they receive, perhaps sites such as collegestudent.com will
encourage such individuals to pay more attention to those evaluations and
become better (and more responsive) teachers as a result.
Rick
--
Rick Adams
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Department of Social Sciences
Jackson Community College, Jackson, MI
"... and the only measure of your worth and your deeds
will be the love you leave behind when you're gone."
Fred Small, J.D., "Everything Possible"
