On the Flip: Students rate professors online

The Record (KRT)Her students at William Paterson University say Professor Eliana Antoniou even makes calculus interesting. And she has a good fashion sense. In fact, Antoniou – who has a Ph.D. from the New Jersey Institute of Technology – has earned a chili pepper. The icon, indicating that she is “hot,” appears beside a smiley face: a good rating on the Web site RateMyProfessors.com.The Web site, which “lets students do the grading,” is by no means scientific, and is the bane of some faculty. But the nationwide Web site – the most popular of its kind – is also hot.The site gets nearly 2,000 posts daily from students in the United States and Canada. There are more than 1.2 million postings, rating 228,000 professors at 3,345 schools. Its popularity has grown exponentially over the past year. While students do a fair amount of venting on the site, about two-thirds of the posts are positive or contain constructive criticism. Users say the site helps students do what they have always informally tried to do: find a good teacher. It’s no secret that the quality of undergraduate teaching at colleges and universities runs the gamut, and students say they’ll take whatever information they can get to choose a good professor.”The site has been a lot of help,” said Samantha Welsh, a junior at NJIT. One of the most common complaints at her school, she says, is that students can’t understand some of the foreign-born professors.Welsh now helps administer the site at her school, weeding out any personal attacks or “inappropriate” comments. There are now more than 4,000 ratings of 300 professors at NJIT.”People tell each other about it, and with every class it gets more popular,” Welsh said.Students anonymously rate their professors on a scale of 1 to 5 – 5 being the best – on easiness, helpfulness, and clarity. The easiness rating, however, does not make it into the final grade for overall quality. Nor does the hotness quotient. Antoniou has worked hard to be taken seriously, but says the hotness rating doesn’t bother her. “It’s amusing,” she said.The Web site’s creator, John Swapceinski, admits the gimmick was meant to drum up interest in the site.”It’s a fun thing,” said the Silicon Valley software engineer.Some students use it to denote sexiness while others simply want to give good professors a great rating.Either way, it’s boosted the entertainment value of, and traffic on, the site, said Swapceinski.Students also provide comments. Antoniou, for instance, was lauded by students for her caring and competence, and earned a 4.9 in 14 evaluations.Other professors don’t fare as well. “Completely clueless, yet kind of hot. A sad combination,” one student wrote about a professor at Ramapo College. A student at another school noted the number of ceiling tiles in his classroom – the counting of which may be a clear indicator of a boring instructor. Just about every college and university in New Jersey is represented. Seton Hall and Rutgers universities are among the top-posting schools. Rutgers, for instance, has 3,077 posts rating 830 teachers.Rutgers students have several venues to rate their teachers. A new student-developed Web site on campus, ScheduleAgent.com, lets students plan their schedules, rate their teachers, and sell their textbooks.The university also operates an elaborate system of receiving feedback on faculty, through, among other things, forms that students fill out at the end of each semester. Based on those evaluations, statistics are generated, which are available to everybody with a Rutgers e-mail address. The university processed more than 300,000 such forms last year.The volume makes the system more credible than self-selecting Web sites like RateMyProfessor, yet the appeal of the latter, and its capacity for instant feedback, can’t be denied, administrators say.”Students’ environment has very much changed and this (the Internet) is their environment,” said Nancy Omaha Boy, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rutgers-Camden.She said the sites also can provide faculty with timely feedback for midcourse corrections.But faculty members aren’t always receptive.”I’ve gotten nasty letters from professors demanding to have their names removed from the site or they are going to contact their lawyer,” said Swapceinski, the creator. “It’s kind of funny, the number of people with Ph.D.s who don’t have a concept of the First Amendment.”Last year, there was a flap at Seton Hall after an adjunct professor responded with an invective e-mail to students when she got a bad rating on another site. Her contract was not renewed by the university.It doesn’t cost anything to rate a professor or to review ratings, but users who seek more than one page of ratings on a given teacher are charged a fee. Otherwise, the site depends on advertisers.Swapceinski said the site isn’t making money yet. Nor is its companion site for high school students, RateMyTeachers.com. For now, Swapceinski will keep his day job.Swapceinski started his site in 1999 after a grueling semester in graduate school at San Jose State University in California. “I had one teacher in particular who was a real ogre,” he said. “I found out later there was another teacher who taught the same class. I realized I could have saved myself three months of hell.”When postings start at a particular school, the site is more “of an entertainment or novelty,” said Swapceinski. “As time goes by, and once it passes 1,000 (postings), you have a critical mass. There is enough feedback and traffic that it becomes statistically relevant.”Henry Amoroso, a Hackensack attorney and business law professor at Seton Hall, says he takes his teaching seriously and is mindful of the student evaluations that his department solicits. But he’ll take the unscientific chili pepper too.”Isn’t that a delight?” said Amoroso, who got a 4.9 rating on RateMyProfessors.com. “Education is a service business, students are becoming smarter customers,” he said. “They don’t want to go to school to waste time.”His dean at the Stillman School of Business, Karen Boroff, said student evaluations are important in assessing professors. She said most students recognize what makes a good teacher – even if that teacher isn’t an easy grader. And most provide constructive comments in getting at what can be the most important part of an undergraduate’s learning experience.”When I interview faculty here, I tell all of them no amount of research, no matter how great it is, will ever trump teaching,” Boroff said.It only makes sense that Professor Mark Hillringhouse at Passaic County Community College would get a good online rating. After all, for the past year, he has taught his philosophy and French classes online.Hillringhouse, a poet who came to teaching 20 years ago, got a whopping 5.0 rating in eight evaluations, not to mention a chili pepper after three students rated him hot. He was praised for changing students’ lives and opening their eyes.”I’m flattered,” he said. “I guess the reason I’m popular with the students is that I’m always in contact with them. That’s the one thing they like – the reassurance that the instructor is there.”