Class action: Professors, adjuncts, and graduate students of America Vs. RateMyProfessors.com.
"Plaintiffs bring this action on behalf of themselves and others similarly situated, and allege upon personal knowledge and belief as to their own acts, that yellow smiley faces, green nonplussed faces, and blue frowning faces are not an accurate indicator of teaching ability, and that, moreover, defendant RateMyProfessors.com (hereafter RMP) has made a thankless task thoroughly unbearable."
A little extreme? Perhaps, but sometimes I really do feel like suing.
Make no mistake, my hands are not clean: I admit that every morning I go online to read the New York Post's Page Six gossip column, and then click over to the new evaluations on RateMyProfessors.com (the sites are basically equivalent). I'm still finishing my dissertation in English so I'm not yet on the job market. But I've decided that the site is a potential career liability, and even more important, largely detrimental to one's professional role as a teacher.
The obvious appeal of RateMyProfessors is its leveling quality -- the way it gives a public voice to the student in the back row who has noticed that his Nobel-laureate professor wears mismatched socks. One student claims, for example, that the once-innovative lectures of a certain luminary in the humanities are now like watching reruns of Leave It to Beaver.
There's something breathtaking about the way an entire oeuvre can be reduced to a flippant one-sentence dismissal, capped by a reference to a TV show that the student has probably only read about in a media-studies class.
At the same time that RateMyProfessors sends us all into the trough of the gossip column, the site also functions as the eggheads' substitute for Facebook or better yet, MySpace. I suspect that for academics who are slightly too old to have all their ex-classmates on those sites, RateMyProfessors is a way to "stay in touch," as it were, with old friends and enemies.
It's here that an aspect of my personality that I don't like very much is brought out -- as per Thomas H. Benton's recent "The Seven Deadly Sins of Professors." My sin here is most definitely pride, and perhaps sloth as well. And now that I think of it, envy, greed, and lust -- the whole shebang, basically, with some schadenfreude thrown into the mix.
My teaching career began well, or so I thought. I gave myself credit for being a direct, no-b.s. instructor, and tried to maintain a stress-free classroom. I gloried in the incandescent smiley faces that lit up on my RateMyProfessors profile: Not only am I enlightening America's youth, I thought, but for the first time in my life, I'm popular!
Over the next few months, however, a disturbing trend started to emerge. Students on the site began to remark on how easy I was as a grader. "It is easy to obtain an A; just follow the steps." Not good. In addition, I began to think that the frequent laughter in my class was not with me, but at me. "He's a bit strange with an awkward sense of humor."
I reached the nadir on a recent night when, tired of dissertating, I went online. Using the helpful "Last Rated" button, I trolled RateMyProfessors: Goodie, there were new evaluations, including a negative one of a teacher from another university who had turned me down for a date years ago. A student reviewer claimed that she was too demanding, chastised her for taking points off his perfectly decent essays, and concluded in gentlemanly fashion that she had a stick up her butt. I'll reserve comment here, except to say that my reaction fell under the heading of the eighth deadly sin named above.
I clicked over to my university's "Last Rated" page and received a shock: My own name was there. And, glancing at the "Overall Quality" column, I saw that my rating had dropped from 3.8 to 3.7 -- perilously close to "green face" territory. The review would not be a good one.
Steeling myself, I clicked over to the new evaluation: I was a "confusing" teacher, but made up for it by being such a pushover. "Grades really easy." And most glaring of all was the student's three-word assessment of my personality, put up on a Web site where anyone -- adviser, gloating ex-friends, Oprah Winfrey -- could see it: "Strange and awkward."
How effective am I as a teacher if my students can't think of any new words with which to slam me? What about "eccentric," or "clumsy and a bit daft"? Haven't they ever heard of a thesaurus?
For the next few minutes I paced my apartment, picking up my roommate's derelict box of Raisin Bran and smacking it back down on the counter, kicking the pillows on the couch and then guiltily fluffing them back up.
So that was it. I hadn't achieved after-the-fact popularity at all. No, I had replaced my role as class nerd with a creepier one: the guy who hung out at the edge of the parking lot who could get you stuff, opening his coat to reveal cheap B+'s. I was just a pushover -- a weird pushover.
In short, my faith in the smiley faces had been shattered. One might argue that the way to deal with the scourge of RateMyProfessors is simply to overcome the deadliest sin, that of pride. After all, if the site is basically a popularity contest, then it involves a certain narcissism to pay so much attention to it.
But RateMyProfessors is viewed seriously or semi-seriously by important people and institutions. Our campus newspaper occasionally dismisses the site's importance but says that students should consult it when selecting courses. Last year a columnist on this site, Ivan Tribble revealed that his department evaluates job candidates' blogs, and one wonders if clicking over to RateMyProfessors is also a convenient way to assess the "real person" behind jobseekers' facades.
Most stunningly, some instructors I know have been told that their ratings are read in order to track their performance.
If that's how it is, I thought, I better pay attention to this thing.
But I'm not sure evaluators and hiring committees should take the site seriously. To be sure, there are conscientious students who will note that a given teacher has done a good job of imparting knowledge. But more often the site seems to foster -- and even enforce -- a consumerist mentality, whose central maxims are that professors should:
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Entertain me.
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Grade more easily.
RateMyProfessors serves as a tool for students to punish teachers who resist that model of education. Of course, the same remarks might be made in the standard course evaluation forms that professors collect at the end of a semester. But with its frowning bloated-blue faces attached to comments, and a list of the funniest smackdowns that students have given to supposedly unbearable teachers, RateMyProfessors hypes that aspect of its service.
I suspect the main value of the site for students is how it makes dorm-room gossip about "easy" and "hard" classes public. Generally the magic number hovers around 2.8 on the site's 1-to-5 easiness scale (1 being extremely hard, 5 being very lax). A 2.4 grader is very likely to be judged a bad teacher, and conversely, teachers who are rated 3.0 or above tend to have chipper yellow smiles, despite their strange qualities and awkward moments.
Students can be quite brutal, especially to female instructors. But whether you're male or female, a bad rating can make you feel like hiding behind the podium, sometimes.
And I've now come to realize that those poor professors whom I chortled over were the brave ones. They weren't afraid to unsettle the students, and they weren't so concerned with whether the students liked them.
Meanwhile, I was a parasite: grading leniently and receiving smiling seals of approval, while tougher colleagues endured comments like "this arrogant hippie should not be teaching."
Henceforth, no more Mr. Nice Guy. RateMyProfessors has created a teacher who is going to make sure his students sweat for their A's and B's. The hardworking students (and there are plenty of them) will not have a problem with that, but a few others will resent me and take revenge. And that's fine.
In fact, my new goal where RateMyProfessors is concerned is to have the sickly, sycophantic yellow smile beside my name change into a periwinkle-blue frown.
More fundamentally, it seems to me that as professionals, we should clarify just what our attitude toward the Web site should be. Given the way its anonymous brigands can exacerbate the problems of grade inflation and student consumerism, it seems that hiring committees, course supervisors, and fellow instructors should largely discount the site as a source of information. The other alternative, as far as I can see, is to adopt the angry-consumer model ourselves. Class action anyone?
