Wednesday, September 29, 1999

Web Sites Offer Evaluations of Professors, for Better or Worse By WENDY R. LEIBOWITZ Web sites on which students can post evaluations of their professors are proliferating, and there's not much the professors can do about it. Some are large sites, such as collegestudent.com, "Unfiltered gossip is the bane of the Internet," says the dean of New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Science. "I hope that we develop Internet literacy so people learn how to take this with a grain of salt." which invites critiques from students at more than 400 universities. Some are small, such as grade-it.com, which focuses on 13 universities located mainly in the South and Southwest. Whatever their size or scope, they feature uncensored, anonymous, and unsubstantiated comments that name professors at specific universities. "AAAAAAH! bad teacher!" reads a post at CollegePro-Net. "i would NEVER recommend him as a teacher for chem233 because it seemed he did not care for his students. He would tell you to come to his office if you need help, but what he didn't tell you was that he'd yell at you for asking a 'stupid' question." (CollegePro-Net's site carries a warning label: "CollegePro-Net does not verify the accuracy of any review.") As is true elsewhere on the Internet, it's the most disgruntled individuals who seem to be the most interested in taking the time to write. Some of their criticisms appear to be well-founded, such as those that concern professors who do not keep their office hours, or teaching assistants whose English is incomprehensible. Other comments, however, focus on professors' sexual proclivities, taste in clothing, or body odor. The criticism can be harsh, personal, and -- on the Web -- oh-so-public. "I believe in student evaluations," says Catharine R. Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. "But this takes student evaluations and exacerbates everything that's wrong with them. It's the unbalanced judgment, the passing on of gossip and resentment. "Unfiltered gossip is the bane of the Internet," Ms. Stimpson says. "I hope that we develop Internet literacy so people learn how to take this with a grain of salt." While formal evaluations at the end of courses are a fixture at many college and universities, the results generally circulate only within the institutions. Similarly, students have always exchanged frank comments about professors' teaching abilities or lack thereof -- at some institutions, students have even published guidebooks to the faculty -- but these exchanges also took place largely within the confines of the campus. The comments posted on the Internet, on the other hand, are available to the whole world. They could potentially affect a scholar's reputation in the wider academic community, or even end up as the target of lawsuits -- if a professor chooses to fight back, and can find someone to sue. Professors say that one of the main problems with such sites is that most let isolated comments stand for an entire class's worth of students, or even for an entire institution. Generally, university-sponsored evaluations are solicited from every student in a class, usually by distributing a form at the end of a semester. On some campuses, summaries of the evaluations, or the evaluation forms themselves, are then published, in paper form, with studied judgments as well as off-the-cuff observations. A particularly harsh evaluation is averaged out in the wash of other critiques. But on the Web, anyone with an ax to grind is free to grind away. Many of the evaluation sites are new, so most courses are represented by only one or by a handful of comments, usually from someone who has suffered a negative experience. There is no way to verify whether a student has posted more than one comment using different names, or even whether the student took the course or not. Thanks to the anonymity the Web sites promise, students could go to a competing college's evaluation page and enter comments critical of every professor at the institution. On the other hand, student evaluations on the Web can be a helpful source of information about the strongest and weakest instructors -- and are perhaps the only source of such information for prospective students, who have no way of obtaining on-campus guides. At the University of California at Los Angeles, "student evaluations are not available unless you go to the records office," says Eugene Volokh, a law professor there. "You can do it, but it's not something that prospective students will do." Students are paying good money for courses, he says, so reliable evaluations are useful. They can steer students towards the best professors. "Perhaps on-line evaluations can be vehicles for the school to improve," says Mr. Volokh. The positive features of on-line evaluations are evident. In electronic form, evaluation information can be easily searched. The collegestudent.com site splices the information in different ways, to allow students to see results of an evaluation by respondents' gender, class year, or by course difficulty. Some go back several years. A few professors have embraced the inevitable, posting their student evaluations on their personal Web sites or on sites provided for them by the university. Among them is Jose Llanes, a professor of organization and leadership at the University of Texas-Pan American. One professor who received two poor comments on line is not surprised that students have gone public with their evaluations. "I'm not surprised, because everything is going on the Net," says Ammon Herman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Maryland at College Park. Evaluations at Mr. Herman's university are not standardized -- and possibly not very helpful to students. "I was surprised to learn there's no standard format," he says. "In chemistry, we use a short questionnaire. The end-of-the-semester evaluations are not published. Most people writing comments have an ax to grind one way or another." U.C.L.A.'s Mr. Volokh also knows the sting of low evaluations, but does not oppose their being posted on the Web. "I find student evaluations very helpful, very important, and very unpleasant and even painful to read," he says. "I'd be embarrassed to see them posted on the Web, even if most of them were good, because I know that some of them are bad." A native of Ukraine, Mr. Volokh brings to his classroom the trait that seems to provoke more anger in evaluations than any other: He speaks with a foreign accent. "I tend to mumble a little, and sometimes speak too quickly," he acknowledges. "When you're in the middle of an idea, you're not focusing on your speech," he notes, adding that scholars are not hired for their English proficiency. Students may find that frustrating, he says, but their only recourse -- especially in the case of tenured professors -- may be making their complaints public. "Sometimes universities talk about being more consumer-focused, but they're not, in that sense, Wal-Mart." Faculty members who try turning to the law probably can't stop students from complaining -- no matter how wide their audience. If the comments are opinions, strong free-speech traditions protect them. "There's no constructive-criticism clause in the First Amendment," says Mr. Volokh. It is unlikely that a Web site would face legal liability if libelous or defamatory comments were posted as part of its course-evaluation service. Sites, much like telephone companies, are shielded by specific Congressional statute as passive transmitters of information. A student posting a comment might face liability in an extreme case where a professor could demonstrate that his or her career had suffered because of false remarks -- and could find the student who made them. Under some circumstances, it is easy to trace the electronic footprints of a poster back to a specific computer or e-mail account. "You could subpoena the [identifying] information about them from the Web-site operator," says Mr. Volokh. "But they might not have the information. If they allow people to submit comments from the Web using input boxes, they wouldn't have the information," he notes, adding: "If I were the site, I'd try to set up e-mail boxes that way." And lawsuits are probably not advisable, anyway. "It wouldn't be good P.R. for a university to sue people who claim to be their students," says Mr. Volokh. "Just let it lie." A lawsuit isn't the only way of responding, he says. "One of the ways to fight anonymous criticism is to make clear that it's anonymous and unaccountable. The site could be persuaded to put up a note saying, 'These are anonymous posts and take them as you would anonymous gossip.'" Taking matters into your own hands is the way of the Web, says Mr. Volokh. "If the professor feels very strongly, he could ask some students to post and say, 'I was in this person's class and he was a great teacher! And I'm willing to sign my name to this.'" Easy-to-print version E-mail this article