Partly because he was fed up with childish comments on Web sites where students rate their professors, a business-school professor at Temple University has created an online forum for students who want to sound off. So as not to mislead students, the site’s title suggests its intent: “Thank You Professor.”
“There are so many vehicles for students to express their opinion,” says the site’s creator, Samuel D. Hodge Jr., chairman of the business school’s legal-studies department. “But there’s nothing really at the school where the professor can get a letter directly from the student.”
When the site went live on May 1, Mr. Hodge says, he expected about a dozen comments in the first week. Instead, more than 200 flooded in. He converts each note into a letter to the faculty member being praised, then makes sure the business school’s dean gets a copy.
Mr. Hodge moderates the comments, but so far there haven’t been any negative posts on the site, he says.
For example, the four “thank you notes” left on the site so far for Rob B. Drennan Jr., an associate professor of risk, insurance, and health-care management, have been uniformly laudatory (three were signed, and one was anonymous). “I truly enjoyed his class,” wrote one student, Tom Coia. “Difficult and challenging, but isn’t that what we want from school?” Contrast that to an anonymous comment concerning Mr. Drennan that a student left last spring on RateMyProfessors.com: “BOOOOO!!!!!”
Mr. Hodge, incidentally, has appeared on an MTV Web site of faculty members who “strike back” against comments on RateMyProfessors.com. He says Ohio State University is the only other institution he knows of that gives students a way to thank their professors on the Web.
Temple may extend the site to the whole university, he says: “It’s such positive reinforcement.” —JJ Hermes
