EAKIN MARK E said on 3/25/03 8:08 AM: >I found that anyone (student or faculty) can rate professors using this >service. There is no way that pick-a-prof can tell who is doing the rating >without a list of students and their id numbers. So if your classes are >getting to big, sign on to the service under different email addresses >and give yourself bad reviews. Similarly you might want to give other >teachers great reviews if you want the students to go to their classes >instead. In fact I looked at one of my reviews and it started off "Mark is >a great teacher ..." which makes me believe that one of my fellow faculty >members submitted this. > >Sarcasm aside, the results of this type of polling can be easily >biased by just a few individuals.
There is really nothing new to this practice of publishing evaluations of teachers. When I was an undergraduate at Georgia Tech in the late 1970s we filled out evaluations for a book which was published yearly. It included grade distributions (back when grades were posted in the corridors, they were easy to get) statistics about some standard questions, and a list of comments from students. I avoided some professors based on that book. This is just the internet and nationalized version of the same thing. But, it is also not as good because anyone can fill out a form online, even if at a school never attended. Paul . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
