RateMyTeacher.com -- Students Fight Back

I think they had like every teacher at my school on the site. Pretty cool. Brings back memories. Ahh yes... '98.

I have to agree. Children just aren't mature enough to be objective. Heck, I know college kids who couldn't give objective opinions of their teachers!

It strikes me as just a gimmick for traffic so they can sell ad space.

Most students don't have the experience to rate their teachers. It's a nice gimmic though which lets kids feel they have a say, and teachers may see some comments which make them improve their work. For it to be anyway useful they should only let students rate their previous teachers and not their current teacher. Then they could at least rate them with a reference against their current teacher.

Paul.

Unfortunately there would be no reasonable way that you could put restrictions in like that (rating previous teachers only). It wouild be virtually impossible to do.

Now apparently there is also a ratemyprofessors.com site and I could see some benefit from that site (if the ratings were actual) where college students could use the list to choose their classes/profressors. But for it really to be effective you would probably need a high count of ratings and not the 2 or 3 ratings that most teachers have at ratemyteacher.com.

Many student unions already have an informal rate your lecturers. Certainly the student union in the last university I worked at asked all students to rate lecturers at the end of term. Ratings wear split into knowledge, presentation skills, question answering skills, and general helpfulness / friendliness. Courses would then be rated seperately under difficulty, quantity of work and class size.

The results would be sent to the deaprtments each term and be available to students. LEcturers who were scoring badly at presentation skills would often be sent of training courses.

Paul.

At my University we had two different teacher rankings. We had one that was handled by the school and the results were not avalible to the public. It had some good questions but we never saw the results, supposadly the teachers did but it was anon so they never knew who said what. Basically, the system was useless.

However, some intelligent students created a website that allowed the students to rank the teachers and I've yet to really hear any complaints about it...except from teachers who get bad rankings. Its not endoresed by the University but it IS a good service to the students. It actually has helped me where I got a teacher who was ranked badly and it was incredibly accurate. Yes, you'll have students who get bad grades because of their own performance and rank a teacher badly but there was normally something like 100+ rankings of each teacher. Its not a perfect system...but it def. gives us an idea of which teachers just plain suck.

Its not really a help in highschool though. Why? Because you can't pick your teachers. Whats the point?

I think the "rate my teacher" should be from the parent's opinion. You could rate it on how well your child did, the types of things that they learned, and if you had any issues with the teacher. That site pretty much leaves out the elementary teachers since kids aren't going to post there until they are older.

I think it would be a nice thing for each school to have on their own (or maybe school district) and make it part of an overall school portal. Give each student (or maybe parents as well) a login and allow them to rate their teachers...but over the entire semester and have more fine grained questions. Then at the end allow a summary evaluation. Sure kids will over and under rate, but the mean should approach somewhere in the ballpark....better yet, create a wiki type system that allows "self correction"....just a thought

I agree with T-man. this site only serves to reinforce negative stereotypes about teachers-the popular ones are the ones who give no homework, have low expectations, just like to schmooz-nothing that really is at the heart of what teaching adolescents is really all about-In addition, I found many of the comments to be downright mean-spirited and cruel. How about if the shoe were on the other foot and teahcers could post anonymous comments about students on a web-site?

Karen,

That is an interesting point. If teachers were able to rate students on behavior, social skills, attitude and etc I do not think there would be many students who would be able to handle it. And their parents as well. I'm sure there would be a huge outrage over it.

Teachers have all the power on rating a student on their behavior, attitude, etc. so why not give the kids a voice for a change, they too have an opinion. Since the kids are not free to say out loud how they feel toward a teacher then let them say it here. Could it be that the teachers who are so disliked be afraid to be held accountable? Sounds like it here. Those wonderful teachers out there should also be able to read just how much they are loved and appreciated by both the kids and parents. Everyone including the kids deserve to have an opinion like it or not.

Nicnac,

No one here is saying that kids shouldn't be able to voice their opinion. The problem is the high potential for misuse of the system. By having the ability to say whatever you want about a teach anonymously is going to fuel malicious comments. Not all comments but enough to make the system useless. You will have students rating a teacher as being a real good teacher because they don't give much homework, or you may have students rating a teach very low because they do give homework.

There are many reasons why someone may not give a fair an accurate rating. Whether it's a good or bad rating. Because of this how can you tell the fair ratings from the malicious ratings? You can't. And because you can't tell which ratings are fair it really makes the system useless.

The idea for allowing students to rate the teachers and have those ratings be publically available is a good idea in theory but in praticality it just doesn't work.

What's to prevent a non-student from posting bogus negative or positive comments -- for that matter, what's to prevent a teacher from going in 4 or 5 times with positive things to say about him/herself? It's flawed in many ways. In practice I do not like the idea of this, but it does allow freedom of expression (if not abused, but unfortunately there will be abuses at both the hs and college level). I think the most important point someone made is something I thought of -- it can allow a teacher to at least think twice about something they may or may not be doing effectively -- but it also should be taken with a grain of salt. I think the college site is much more useful for reasons stated above (critical reasoning difference, choice of profs). But even in that case, there are many instances I can think of college profs that others thought poorly of that I liked for whatever reason and vice-versa -- I guess there is no replacement for personal experience in the end, and everything is relative. I am a high school social studies teacher -- I am often surprised by the kinds of students who relate to me and seem to get a lot from my course that don't seem likely at first, and vice versa -- you can never know who you will reach and when -- the teachers I thought of as tough were, in retrospect, great for me 10 years later. Ask me to evaluate at 18 vs. at 29 and you will get a huge difference. Unfortunately, this site has ease as if that's a good thing, when in fact challenging a student is seen as "low" rating. In our dept., we teach some elective courses. My colleagues give out evaluations at the end, similar to college classes. I do not do this -- why? Because I know I will get things like "too much reading" or "too many writing assignments," and to be quite honest, I know what I am assigning in my elective course and why I am assigning it, so I can not accept criticism for reform in any of those areas from students who I feel I am preparing for college and life beyond high school in ways that they can not understand yet. This site has sort of the same problem -- but it does make for an interesting debate on public/private knowledge, student/teacher accountability, etc. My other teaching friend says this has gone on for years word of mouth before one ever devised a website (marketing scheme) for it -- so true.

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i think that rate my teacher is a good idea because the teachers always jugde us y can we judge them fair is fair

I am a teacher that is currently being evaluated by that site. I find it extremely offensive that a site can use my name without my permission. I actually like the idea of discourse about my teaching style, yet I have no ability to debate with the statements and explain my actions. The site needs an opt out function, it needs to upgrade it's evaluation process to be more precise and scientific, and it needs to have a teacher response section to every student's critque.

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RateMyTeacher.com is a site that you probably have not heard of yet but probably will soon, especially if you have kids. RateMyTeacher.com is a site where students, or anyone actually, can go to the site and rate their middle or highschool teacher by giving a 1-5 rating in the categories of easiness, helpfullness, clarity and popularity. You then can view the overall and individual ratings that people are giving teachers along with comments that are given at the time of the rating.
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Their mission statement is for "students to be informed about teachers they'll have in the future. It gives students and parents a good foundation for where their education is leading." This gives students the ability have more of a voice in their education and the ability to hold teachers accountable for what they do, or do not do, in the classroom. And students can use this

Students deserve to rate their teachers cuz their teachin us we need to tell them that they are or aint dooin a good job (Which some aint).

I like your suggestion that students rate past teachers. I now realize that some of the teachers I detested are the ones who taught me well. I'm very grateful now. I'm currently a teacher as well, and labelled as "hard". I'm rated on this site, with a wide rage of opinions. Some students love me, some do not! And I have to admit, it did hurt my feelings to see a few "1s", but I think back to those teachers who I had in high school who I would have given a similar rating to - they were doing a great job - just not in their students eyes!

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RateMyTeacher.com is a site that you probably have not heard of yet but probably will soon, especially if you have kids. RateMyTeacher.com is a site where students, or anyone actually, can go to the site and rate their middle or highschool teacher by giving a 1-5 rating in the categories of easiness, helpfullness, clarity and popularity. You then can view the overall and individual ratings that people are giving teachers along with comments that are given at the time of the rating.
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Their mission statement is for "students to be informed about teachers they'll have in the future. It gives students and parents a good foundation for where their education is leading." This gives students the ability have more of a voice in their education and the ability to hold teachers accountable for what they do, or do not do, in the classroom. And students can use this

I really believe that many children are not mature enough to evaluate the teachers. They do not know the entire circumstances of a classroom, and a good teacher does not let the student(s) in on all the situations in the room. We work with them. Sometimes we are successful; sometimes we are not. Oftentimes a students does not appreciate the teacher until many years have gone by. I am sure they would not like to be evaluated publically.