Below is a link to my entry on
RateMyProfessors.com.
I'd just like to make a couple of suggestions first:
- When you rate one instructor, rate all of your instructors at the same
same. Most of the motivation for people to do ratings comes from either
reverence or loathing, so the ratings will tend to be extreme. If
you rate the middle-of-the-road ones as well, it will help to make
things more balanced.
- Include specific comments, either good or bad, to support your
ratings. There are many different reasons why you might consider someone a
good or a bad teacher, and knowing the particulars helps other people to
understand. It also helps the instructor improve and/or keep doing the
good things.
Since I'm a lab instructor, it probably makes sense that my comments are
about how to make the
data which ratings represent more
useful. I think ratings like this can be valuable, especially if people
doing them make a little effort to make their input meaningful.
(Oh, and one more point: if your spelling and grammar are good, it makes
your comments carry more weight. If you're trying to
question someone else's competence,
and you can't produce a correct sentence yourself, your
credibility isn't great.)
Here's the link to
my rating.
Here's another site, but it doesn't get
nearly as much
traffic. (I'm not even on there as of June 2009).
Here's the link to
WLU on
ProfessorPerformance.com.
If there are any more you think I should know about,
let me know.
Here's a fascinating link (from RateMyProfessors) about
looks and ratings.
Here's a link on how profs can
chemically improve their ratings.
Here's a bit of research I did; I took the ratings for
all
instructors listed for Laurier (on December 5, 2005), and did a least
squares fit of quality as
a function of easiness. I found
- slope = 0.58 +/- 0.05
- y - intercept = 1.71 +/- 0.15
Thus if you take a person's score for easiness, their predicted quality
would be q= 0.58*(easiness) + 1.71.
The graph looks like this:
Anyone whose rated quality is higher than that must be doing something
well. (Incidentally, my rated quality is
below, for what it's
worth.)
You could be a bit more discriminating than that; if you include the
standard errors, you can make three categories:
- low; where rated quality is below
q= 0.53*(easiness) + 1.56, which is the lower bound with the errors
- high; where rated quality is above
q= 0.63*(easiness) + 1.86, which is the upper bound with the errors
- medium; in between the two above
This makes a bit of difference from the categories used by the website,
which is
- low; where rated quality is below 2.5
- high; where rated quality is above 3.5
- medium; where rated quality is between 2.5 and 3.5
For instance, if you get rated 1 for easiness, (ie. fire-breathing),
if you get a rated quality of 2.49 or above you're doing well.
On the other hand, if you get rated 5 for easiness, (ie. give marks away
like Santa Claus), then rated quality of 4.5 is really still mediocre.
The philosophical question this raises is whether being easy gets a higher
quality rating, or whether being of good quality gets a higher easiness
rating. (Can you even distinguish those???)