During FastTrack advising last week, some of the new students asked “can you recommend particular teachers?” Not knowing the different first-year writing, math, and econ profs, I told them to check out RateMyProfessors.com — the market-leading faculty evaluation site, now owned by the noted research firm MTV/Viacom. Many professors are not big fans of the site, but that’s the back-alley where our undergraduates go for information because they have no good alternatives.
A recent study (somewhat surprisingly) showed that the online ratings on RateMyProfessors.com correlate very highly with the “official” teaching evaluations, at least in one state university system.
This result has been interpreted in at least two different ways:
- RateMyProfessors.com is more accurate than we think
- most “official” evaluations are less accurate than we think, being no better than the methodological disaster zone known as RateMyProfessors.com
Taking a break from my extensive summer duties, I downloaded the summary scores (‘quality’ and ‘ease’) for the 38 faculty categorized as Business or Business Administration at USF. Our average ‘quality’ score is 3.6 out of 5, with the average ‘ease’ score at 3.2 (5 easiest, 1 hardest). For our ‘chili pepper’ faculty, rated as ‘hot’ by the students, the ‘quality’ average jumps to 4.52! Cool! (Maybe our students can’t tell the difference between physical beauty and pedagogical effectiveness? Or are the beautiful just better than the rest of us?).
And to add to the eternal debate about whether faculty who are ‘easy’ get higher evaluations, the answer from RateMyProfessors.com is…seems like it. ‘Quality’ and ‘ease’ scores are correlated at 0.52 (p<0.001). When you remove faculty that have fewer than 5 evaluations, that correlation increases to 0.60 (p<0.005).