Grading the graders

Kayla Webley / Contributing Writer
2004-01-06
The Daily

"If I was tested on her family, I would have gotten an A."

"I learned how to hate a language I already know."

"BORING! But I learned there are 137 tiles on the ceiling."

"She hates you already."

These comments from UW students are posted on RateMyProfessors.com. This Web site gives students an opportunity to rate professors on their overall teaching performance, as well as on a variety of individual categories.

Based on these ratings, the professors are then assigned different colored smiley faces for their overall ratings: blue for bad ratings, yellow for good ratings and green for somewhere in the middle.

The site includes more than 3,611 colleges and has more than 1.3 million ratings on more than 280,000 professors. Of these professors, the UW has 226 professors rated on the Web site.

John Swapceinski, who is both the founder and webmaster of the site, created it in 1999 based on his own dislike for a professor while in college at San Jose State University (SJSU).

"At SJSU, I had a particularly dastardly professor whom I decided to warn the world about," Swapceinski said.

Swapceinski's own disgust for a professor morphed into a tool for students everywhere.

"The Web site gives students access to a wide variety and breadth of opinions of their fellow students," Swapceinski said. "[It] allows them to make more informed decisions about which professors to take."

Christine Van Loan, a UW freshman, has been using the Web site off and on since July 2003. Van Loan feels the site can help students prepare for a class before they walk into class on the first day of the quarter.

"I'm really only interested in clarity and helpfulness because chances are if a professor is clear and helpful, then they are a good professor," said Van Loan. "The difficulty of their class won't be as important because you know you will be able to ask them for help and clarification when necessary."

When creating the site, Swapceinski tried to narrow the number of categories that would reflect how well a professor teaches. His goal was to keep the site as simple as possible so students would have a fairly easy time using it. In order to accomplish this, he decided professors would receive grades from students based on "easiness," "helpfulness," "clarity" and "hotness."

"No one rated me on hotness," said UW communication professor David Domke when he first viewed his ratings on the Web site.

Domke has six ratings, three of which are positive and three that are somewhat negative. One rating describes his teaching skills as "charismatic and interesting," while others say he is "a dork" and "conceited."

Faced with the variance in his ratings, Domke said that this is exactly what he would expect. He speculated that the website draws two types of students: those who hated the class and those who loved it.

Domke took his ratings to heart. While he may teach a class that is good in his mind, Domke explained, there are always going to be students who disagree, and that can be humbling.

"I won't just completely write this off as a bunch of idiots or anything like that. It will still affect me and the way I teach my classes," Domke said.

When confronted with ratings that described his teaching as "useless," "unhelpful" and "unprepared," Martin Dickey, UW professor of computer science and engineering, was serious.

Dickey did not shrug off the ratings as a joke because he felt a student would have to have determination to post comments like those written about his classes. He pointed out that the usefulness of the Web site is compromised because the ratings can be taken out of context.

More than the comments posted on RateMyProfessors.com, Dickey values the UW courseevaluations ratings, which students fill out at the end of each quarter. With the UW rating, he can see how students felt about everything in the course instead of an isolated homework assignment or incident that sparked a nasty comment. He also hopes that potential students will be more likely to go off of opinions of people they know, rather than take the advice of nameless students posting ratings on the Web site.

"People can have drastically different opinions and reactions to a teacher's teaching method. Chances are good that you might like a professor that someone else wasn't so fond of," said Van Loan.

However, if many students consistently point out the same negative traits in a professor, there may be a legitimate problem with the professor, said Van Loan.

As for the "hot rating," Swapceinski added it because he noticed the popularity of Web sites like hotornot.com, a site where visitors can vote whether an individual's photo is attractive or not. He also thought it would spice the Web site up. When students deem a professor attractive, a chile pepper appears next to the professor's name.

UW marketing professor Mark Forehand was deemed worthy of a chile pepper on the Web site.

"His professionally disheveled hair made class fun and exciting. Ole," wrote one student.

Forehand views the rating as "amusing, but in no way diagnostic of my teaching -- or hair."

Forehand feels the site is simply a joke and hopes that it would have no actual influence on students in deciding what classes to take.

The Web site provides the hotness rating in order to pique a student's curiosity and intrigue him or her enough to read the rating, commented Van Loan. The hotness rating is virtually useless, but Van Loan points out that it could not hurt for students searching for a little bit of classroom eye candy.

"I would never make a decision about a professor based on their hotness rating," said Van Loan. "But it can't hurt to have a helpful and hot professor.