Speaking of grade inflation pressures. Paul
http://www.pickaprof.com March 24, 2003 New Online Guides Rate Professors By TAMAR LEWIN OLLEGE PARK, Md. ? When Kelaine Conochan, a sophomore at the University of Maryland here, was choosing courses for this semester, she went online to Pick-a-Prof to check out the teachers ? and their grading patterns. "In one of the classes I was thinking about, the professor hadn't given a single A," Ms. Conochan said. "And I thought, if there's no chance for me to get an A, I'm not going to take it." Ms. Conochan's consumer-minded approach to her education is not unusual these days: many students see higher education less as a learning opportunity than as a high-priced commodity whose value will be enhanced by good grades. So it is perhaps not surprising that students are devoting more energy to digging up information that will help them gauge their chances of succeeding in particular courses. Students at most universities can find compilations of informal reviews by past students, describing professorial quirks, testing and grading habits. And recently, the Internet has spawned entrepreneurial efforts to provide more elaborate ratings on sites like professorperformance.com, ratingsonline.com and ratemyprofessors.com. But Pick-a-Prof, a three-year-old Web business, is taking consumerism in higher education to a new level, allowing students on some campuses to see the grade distributions for every course and every professor, along with the percentage of students who dropped the course and student reviews of the professor. "I'm sure Pick-a-Prof is going to catch on big," said Brandon DeFrehn, president of the Maryland student government, which paid $10,000 to bring the service to campus. "In terms of the way American higher education is going, it's becoming more of a consumer good, with students seeing themselves as customers and demanding more information." Many students who use the site are enthusiastic, saying it is almost like having Consumer Reports ratings on the professors. Many professors use the Consumer Reports analogy, too, but not all see it as healthy. Some said that information was always good, but others worried that increased emphasis on ratings would lead professors to focus more on popularity than on substance and to forgo complex and subtle instruction for what was easily accessible. Pick-a-Prof, the creation of two graduates of Texas A & M, uses state open records laws to mine public universities for statistical information, and then posts the information online for students. Pick-a-Prof is available on 51 campuses, including Florida State University, Indiana University and the University of Colorado. At most colleges, the student government pays $5,000 to $10,000 a year for the service. Maryland's student government signed on last year, but only last spring's grade distributions are online. "It's never easy to get the information, and in several cases, we've had to use a lawyer, but it's never had to go as far as litigation," said Chris Chilek, who founded Pick-a-Prof with John Cunningham. "The whole idea behind this was that there's lots of information being kept that no one's ever made readily available. "We began thinking about this when we were registering for classes, and you had to keep flipping back and forth in the catalog to see when different classes met, and we were saying it would be so much easier online. Then I asked John if he knew anything about a particular professor, and we realized that would be easy to do online, too." Students can also use the site to build a class schedule or read course descriptions, reading lists or biographical material their professors have posted. Many professors go online, too, both to check student comments and to see whether their grading is too loose or too tough. "I looked at my grade distribution, and I thought maybe mine were too high, so I'm going to get a little stricter," Peter Sandborn, a mechanical engineering professor, said. "I know students look at the site, but I hope they aren't shopping for courses entirely on grade distributions. I do think part of the educational process is to learn from different kinds of teachers, good and bad, because out there in the world, they'll work with different kinds of bosses, good and bad." Other professors contended that although ratings might be useful for choosing a refrigerator or car, they commodify education in an unhealthy way. "I'm not saying the sky is falling, or that it's a crisis, but I do believe that if you start orienting your work to the applause of the audience, that has unfortunate effects," said Dr. William T. Stuart, the director of undergraduate studies in the anthropology department. Professors said that choosing the professor who gave the most A's was not as sensible as choosing the highest-rated refrigerator or air conditioner. "My most rewarding course evaluation came from a student who wrote that they earned a D in my course, but learned more in this final course in their undergraduate experience than they had in previous courses," Robert L. Infantino, associate dean of the College of Life Sciences, said. "A grade distribution does not capture this." Just how reliable Pick-a-Prof's ratings are is open to question, too, because anyone with an e-mail address can post comments on the site. "Ideally, every school would do something like Pick-a-Prof themselves," said Patrick Wu, a member the Maryland student government's executive board. "But because our school has been unwilling to make the information and evaluations available to us, and because we feel that students want the information so badly, we went to Pick-a-Prof." Mr. Wu and other champions of Pick-a-Prof said better access to information about teaching style and practices would ultimately improve educational quality. Furthermore, they said, most students are not focused solely on finding the easy A. Indeed, a search of the site found that professors who gave more A's did not, as a rule, get higher student ratings than those who graded more harshly, nor did professors who gave higher grades have fewer dropouts than their tougher colleagues. Here at College Park, a sprawling campus with more than 25,000 students, most students were unaware that Pick-a-Prof was available, although the campus newspaper, The Diamondback, has carried articles in the last year about the student government's decision to spend $10,000 for the service and renew it for another year, for $6,000. Karen Bragg, a spokeswoman for Pick-a-Prof, said company data indicated 27 percent of the College Park students had registered with Pick-a-Prof and used it this semester. But interviews with dozens of students found only 1 in 10 had heard of Pick-a-Prof, and even fewer had used it. "We know there's not as much awareness as we'd like," Mr. DeFrehn said. "This is still pretty new on this campus." . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
