You are 18 and you feel anxious. You loathe the thought of getting bad grades on your A-levels and affecting your chances to go to University. Your main worry is English taught by Mrs. Devilheart. Talk about a tailor made name...
The only thought that cheers you up is that you won’t have to deal with Mrs. Devilheart for much longer as you are about to finish and soon you will be off to Uni.
But then you realize that at University you will be graded for another 3 years and all of a sudden you don’t feel so good anymore. And on top of that you haven’t picked a career yet, to which you will have to make that decision fairly soon.
Then suddenly this thought sprung up, that you will become an educator, endure 3 more years at University and then it is sweet revenge!
The thought of you exercising your ingrained right to grade pupils and make them feel miserable for their grades just like Mrs. Devilheart made you feel for the past 2 years, brought an ever so slightly evil grin to your face.
You think to yourself: “A lifetime of grading others and never be graded again, what a thrill!”
Are you sure? Think again!
Teachers now are also being graded. That’s what happened in Germany. According to Reuters, a German court overthrew a teacher’s case when she argued that her rights had been violated after being rated by pupils on an online website (Spickmich.de).
The court believed that as long as the opinions are expressed in neither abusive nor insulting manner, the pupils have any right to express their opinions on a teacher’s “performance” on a scale from 1 to 6 (1 being the best grade).
Some of the categories used to assess a teacher are: cool; funny; popular; motivated; human; good teaching.
The rating of a teacher is hardly a new concept. In US a website called Ratemyprofessors.com, which was established in 1999, has now 6.8million students registered and over 1million professors being rated. Another website Ratemyteachers.com, online since 2000, has 10mil registered students and about 1mil high school teachers.
In 2008, the Ratemyprofessors.com website integrated UK universities too, with UK lecturers being rated the same way as the US counterparts.
The difference between Ratemyprofessors.com and Spickmich.de is that the US website allows students to literally post any comments they want regardless of category.
When ratemyprofessors.com opened up to UK institutions, The Independent reported that UK lecturers found the criticism pointing at them to not be very constructive. Some of the comments left by students were: Not very bright; incredibly patronizing; false personality, the book is a better teacher and has a better personality.
These are malicious criticism which does not tackle the problem nor does it offer any constructive suggestions to improve the overall deliverance of the teachers. In fact, some of the criticisms were of personal nature, criticizing the looks of a person rather than the teaching qualities.
Should a teacher’s “hotness” be considered as a category to judge an educator?
This is reminiscent of the sort of treatment Susan Boyle received when she first walked on stage. She was clearly dismissed by the audience due to her looks even before she sang her “I Dream a Dream”.
Rating someone based on things other than their professional competence seems like a form of prejudice. It would be almost synonymous with saying that lecturers would downgrade students based on their nationality, culture or skin colour.
With the proliferation of plastic surgeries around the world, with fashion magazines telling us how we should wear and look, with societies becoming more synonymous with words like consumerism, materialism, have we really lost the plot and became depthless societies? It seems that the word shallow took the form of a shadow and followed us around.
On the other hand, rating a teacher or professor seems like a fair assessment. After all, don’t we all leave reviews for products? In today’s world, if a person wants to buy a laptop or a mobile phone, it simply needs to google the models and within seconds is reading a review page or viewing a review video online about the product.
In today’s standards, getting a better education for oneself or for the children seems like a lifetime contract/investment. If academic institutions are being graded and ranked by success and popularity why shouldn’t their most prized staff be considered for rating? After all in any business transaction, the consumers would want to know what products will they end up having.
Besides, why should professors feel threatened by students’ comments on a website? They should view it as an opportunity to better themselves professionally. If students give good reviews on a fellow instructor, who uses new methods supported by computers, then why not explore and update ones methods?
A little competition doesn’t hurt anybody.
2 comments:
I personally think that there's nothing wrong with the idea of rating a professor/teacher. Of course work performance is not always the only thing students take into consideration when they rate a teacher. One thing we all should know is that rating is a subjective evaluation method. One should always analyze why someone or something was rated in a certain way and not other or if any kind of bias is involved or not.
P.S.- Some of the comments about professors on ratemyprofessor.com are absurd, yet, one can use them for a good LOL.
Sandra, ratemyprofessor website has categories such as hotness.
I think these categories got nothing to do with the professors professional performance.
I believe the German website has categories that do not deal with the physical aspect of the professor. It deals strictly on how the professor delivers the material and conducts the classes and if he/she connects with the students.
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