Students have found yet another use for the popular social networking website MySpace — grading their professors.
At the end of every semester, U students are required to fill out professor evaluations before receiving their grades, but many students are turning to MySpace and other sites for a chance to make their thoughts public.
A number of professor-grading websites have sprung up in recent years, allowing students an alternative forum to speak out about their instructors. Other sites include pickaprof.com and ratemyprofessors.com.
“I choose professors based on their grade,” said junior art history major Theresa Combs, who uses MySpace to grade all of her professors.
MySpace’s professor-grading feature allows students who are registered with the website to grade professor performances on several criteria, including lectures, homework, tests, fairness, grading and accessibility, which are averaged into an overall grade. Students also have the option of leaving comments. Most professor grading websites offer similar content.
On some sites, such as MySpace, students can research their instructors by department, last name or classes taught. Grades and listings are not available for all professors.
The majority of U professors get somewhat favorable ratings. However, some comments display less than cordial criticism of instructors.
The personal comments on MySpace are not reviewed by the website’s administrators, but are policed by other users. A link is available next to every comment for users to report any abusive or slanderous material to the webmasters.
Combs and other students who use the MySpace professor grading system argue that it is a more casual and accurate alternative to instructor evaluations conducted by the U.
“Kids are forced to fill out the U’s evaluations in order to access their grade, so they don’t really put any thought into it,” Combs said.
Some professors, however, aren’t pleased with the online grading system.
In contrast to the U’s evaluations, which all students are required to complete, few students use MySpace to evaluate their teachers.
“Rating websites where students have to seek out the opportunity to rate their professors will only attract students who have a bone to pick, or who really loved a professor,” said Daren Brabham, a graduate teaching fellow in the communication department.
The grading systems employed by the sites are different from the U’s evaluations.
In the U’s evaluations, rather than giving an actual grade or numeral score, students are asked a series of questions about the instructor, as well as the course.
The answer selection ranges from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” with four intermittent possibilities. The responses are then juxtaposed with results for the overall subject and the university as a whole. Students are allowed to write comments at the end of the survey, but those comments are not visible to others who view the evaluation results.Brabham said instructors sometimes don’t receive their evaluations until halfway through the next semester.
“I don’t think there’s really a good system for gathering student evaluations yet,” Brabham said. “The U’s system is pathetic, and MySpace is even worse.”