Are Web sites that let students rate their professors useful guides or just repositories for venegance and snark? It depends on whom you ask.
Kenneth Westhues, a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, argues that RateMyProfessors and its ilk perform a valuable service by forcing faculty members to worry about their teaching, not just their tenure prospects. But many professors are skeptical, observing that the sites allow almost anyone to post critiques with virtually no oversight. One professor even says that faculty members at his institution suspect a colleague of logging onto a site and altering ratings to make his or her own look better by comparison. (Wired News)
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