Validation for RateMyProfessor.Com?

[alcibiades_mystery]

You’ve heard the reasons why professors don’t trust RateMyProfessors.com, the Web site to which students flock. Students who don’t do the work have equal say with those who do. The best way to get good ratings is to be relatively easy on grades, good looking or both, and so forth.

But what if the much derided Web site’s rankings have a high correlation with markers that are more widely accepted as measures of faculty performance? Last year, a scholarly study found a high correlation between RateMyProfessors.com and a university’s own system of student evaluations. Now, a new study is finding a high correlation between RateMyProfessors and a student evaluation system used nationally.

A new study is about to appear in the journal Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education and it will argue that there are similarities in the rankings in RateMyProfessors.com and IDEA, a student evaluation system used at about 275 colleges nationally and run by a nonprofit group affiliated with Kansas State University.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/25/rmp

--------SNIP--------

Yeah boy. :-)

[democrat in Tallahassee]

1. I love that site; I got a 4.9.

And I can tell who wrote every comment!

[AspenRose]

3. But did you get any chile peppers?

}(

[GoesTo11]

2. Some of the comments there are so dead on

I've seen some weird professors where students capture their essence in two words. Sometimes you can tell when the professors are putting in their own reviews. Not a bad way to pick a prof.

[mike_c]

4. I scored a ZERO on hotness and I'll never accept that judgment....

:rofl:

Actually, I'm not real confident about this study but I haven't seen any information other than the OP, so I'll reserve judgment. At my University we're really struggling with the poor quality of student evaluations even in a setting where we have some control over quality-- so much so that the ragged quality of student evals has become a real tenure, promotion, and retention issue. I hear the same sorts of comments from colleagues elsewhere, so comparing RateMyProf to other apparently poor indicators of classroom success seems unlikely to be very informative.

Fair disclosure: I have a 4.0 overall rating.

[XemaSab]

6. You have inspired me to go read the comments for everyone's least favorite botany prof

Good times. :D

[Reverend_Smitty]

5. When I was an undergrad I used rate my professors to pick some electives

My senior year I had one free elective and couldn't decide on taking a Shakespeare course or a history of the Vietnam war course.

Both were interesting topics to me so I used that site to make up my mind...the guy teaching the history class was listed as "right wing and nationalistic in his approach to history" and the guy teaching the Shakespeare class had 12 pages of reviews saying he was their favorite professor ever. Guess what class I took? and you know what, I wasn't disappointed with my choice