Picking Apart Pick-A-Prof

Stephen E. Maizlish has been teaching history at the University of Texas at

ALSO SEE: Other Sites That Rate Professors

Arlington for 25 years. A tenured associate professor, he has edited and written works on antebellum politics and slavery.

But the only things the students in his required American-history class care about are the grades he gives, his personality, and the class workload. At least, that's the picture painted on Pick-A-Prof, a Web service based here that compiles students' ratings of professors.

"I thought Maizlish was a nice guy. Kinda boring at times, but HELLO -- it's history!" is one student's analysis of the professor in a posting on the Web site. "He knows his stuff, so if you go in there trying to b.s. your way through the test, it won't work."

The student gives the professor four stars out of a possible five. A bar graph on the site shows Mr. Maizlish giving most students in the class B's and C's. Arlington is among 51 public universities whose students can use Pick-A-Prof to post comments about, and get the inside dope on, their professors (http://www.pickaprof.com).

Christopher H. Featherstone, president of Arlington's Student Congress, says his group brokered a good deal with Pick-A-Prof, whose officials aggressively pitched the service on repeated visits to the campus. Pick-A-Prof's university liaison, Karen Bragg, also told Mr. Featherstone that the student group could sign a deal with the company or risk losing the service for the roughly 5,000 students on the campus who now use it. "I guess it was kind of an ultimatum," says Mr. Featherstone.

Students at Arlington and other colleges are increasingly seeking electronic access to their classmates' evaluations of professors. When administrators at some institutions fail to meet this demand, Pick-A-Prof often swoops in to woo student-government leaders. Other privately run Web services rate professors, but only Pick-A-Prof charges students to use its service. (Most other services raise revenue from online advertisements.) In return, Pick-A-Prof offers something other sites don't: information about professors' grading patterns, which it collects through state open-records laws.

Making Gains

Pick-A-Prof is making gains. The Student Association at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in January entered a $10,000 one-year contract with the company. The Student Senate at the University of North Dakota in December approved a $5,000 one-year contract. And student-government groups at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of North Texas are considering similar agreements.

But while the company is growing, students at some campuses are deciding that the service isn't worth the money. And many professors accuse Pick-A-Prof of cheapening education.

Pick-A-Prof was started three years ago by two Texas A&M University students eager to test their skills in the marketplace. Chris Chilek and John Cunningham began by posting reviews from students and courses' grade distributions at Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin. Both men graduated in 2000. Mr. Chilek's degree was in computer engineering and Mr. Cunningham's in marketing. Ms. Bragg, the company's liaison to colleges, graduated from Austin in 2001 with a major in communications.

Pick-A-Prof's distinction among professor-review services is its use of open-records laws to post grade distributions and student drop rates for courses. (Because those laws apply only to public institutions, Pick-A-Prof reviews courses and professors at public colleges only.) But the posting of grade distributions is also what most disturbs many professors. They say Pick-A-Prof encourages students to shop for faculty members who will give them high grades without requiring much work in return.

The comments on Pick-A-Prof "tend to be from students who are really looking for one thing, and that is how we grade," says Mr. Maizlish, who serves on the Faculty Senate at Arlington.

He says Pick-A-Prof has affected enrollment patterns in his own history department. He schedules classes for the department, and he has observed that an adjunct professor who gives much higher grades than other teachers has been attracting a large crowd of students -- even for an 8 a.m. class. Mr. Maizlish declines to name the adjunct. "I'd almost feel like I'd be lending to a process I'm not happy with."

Yet despite his criticisms of Pick-A-Prof, Mr. Maizlish says he reads students' comments about him on the site, mainly for their opinions on the books he uses, his teaching style, and class organization. "Students have various things to say that I can learn from."

Dennis P. Reinhartz, who teaches East European and Russian history at Arlington, views Pick-A-Prof as part of a larger movement toward the commodification of higher education. Mr. Reinhartz says he has never bothered to find out how students rate him. "In education, we don't have a product, and secondly, the product isn't constant. It isn't consistent."

Many other professors also say they ignore Pick-A-Prof. "It's not been an item of much discussion among the faculty," says Peter J. Hugill, a geography professor at Texas A&M who heads the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors. The group has not taken a position on the Web service.

'An Enhancement'

Mr. Chilek, the Pick-A-Prof co-founder, disputes the idea that the service diminishes higher education. "It's an enhancement to education," he says. "Pick-A-Prof helps students find the courses and pick the professors they learn best from."

Of the grade distributions, he says, "Any piece of information you can give a student can be valuable." But he denies that students primarily use the site to shop for professors who give high grades.

Still, he acknowledges the site's shortcomings. For instance, this reporter posed as a student, logged in to the site, and could have posted a review of a professor. A faculty member, or anyone else, could do the same thing, Mr. Chilek admits.

Along with posting grade distributions, Pick-A-Prof distinguishes itself from other Web services that rate professors by trying to work with faculty members, student-government leaders, and, in some cases, administrators. In particular, it seeks the participation of professors, who can provide information about their courses or use the site to get feedback from students during the semester. Unlike some sites offering similar services, Pick-A-Prof screens out profanities and personal attacks against professors.

Pick-A-Prof also distinguishes itself by charging students to use the service -- either en masse or, failing that, individually.

Mr. Cunningham is the president of the company. His father, William H. Cunningham, who was a chancellor of the University of Texas System, gave his son money to start the Web service, though he won't say how much. "That's a family matter," says the former chancellor, who now teaches at Austin's business school.

His view of the site? "I think it's great."

Despite the Web site's appeal for students, only some are convinced that Pick-A-Prof is worth the cost. Student-government groups at the University of Texas at Austin and Pennsylvania State University at University Park have rejected Pick-A-Prof in favor of seeking enhancements of internal Web services that post student evaluations of professors.

UT-Austin's Senate of College Councils voted in February against signing a $100,000 contract with Pick-A-Prof after concluding that the cost was too high, and that the university's own Course Instructor Survey offers many of the same services that Pick-A-Prof does. Students at Austin had used Pick-A-Prof free for more than two years. But those using the service are now charged $5 a semester, a fee many avoid by sharing a friend's account.

Raymond B. Ince III, a senior majoring in psychology and government at Austin, calls Pick-A-Prof "amazing." But he advised the Senate to reject a deal with the company. "Students, for the most part, felt that they didn't want to shell out money to a service that we're already doing."

But some university Web services that feature student evaluations, like those at Austin and Penn State, disappoint students by not posting the grade distributions of professors.

The student newspaper at the University of Maryland at College Park, The Diamondback, denounced the Student Government Association there for paying $10,000 to Pick-A-Prof last year. An editorial called the contract "dangerously ill-advised" and said it was approved too hastily.

Sajeed Popat, vice president for public relations for Maryland's student government, has taken the lead in promoting the Web service on the campus. He likes the site for the grade distributions it provides and for a system that can offer feedback to professors, among other features.

He isn't sure, though, how he will vote when the association decides in April whether to continue subscribing to Pick-A-Prof, even though the cost will drop to $6,000 annually. The student government's budget is tight. "It's a financial burden," says Mr. Popat, a senior majoring in government and politics.

Still, he says, he is disappointed that faculty members are not supporting the creation of a university-sponsored Web service that would include evaluations of professors. Such a project has been under discussion for more than a year.

There are "a lot of people who don't think that's a good idea," says Kent Cartwright, a professor of English who is the chairman of Maryland's University Senate, which is composed largely of faculty members. "Besides, our educational-affairs committee became convinced that the students liked Pick-A-Prof."

At Arlington, too, students were drawn to Pick-A-Prof after unsuccessfully pushing university administrators to develop a university-sponsored service using information it already collects, says Michael K. Moore, assistant vice president for academic affairs.

"Students have been requesting course-evaluation information for some time, and there's just not a standard way of doing it," he says. "There's not a way to process evaluations through our information-technology office and have them available to students in an easily readable form."

He says he doesn't like Pick-A-Prof because "it's not sophisticated in the way it processes data." For example, many of the comments students post do not reveal what class the students took, he says.

Arlington and other colleges, for the most part, cooperate with Pick-A-Prof's request for grading information, says Ms. Bragg.

But Frostburg State University, in Maryland, rejected a request last year from the Student Government Association, under the state open-records act, to obtain grading data so that it could be posted on Pick-A-Prof. Karen Treber, the university's lawyer, argues that the law does not require the university to disseminate information that is not readily available.

She says Frostburg does not calculate the grading histories of professors. Compiling such information would require a lot of time from university staff members, she says, and the student-government group has not asked the president if the university can undertake the project.

"Unfortunately, the students ... have this idea that we don't want to give them the information," says Ms. Treber. "That's not true. We don't have the information, not in the way they want it. "

Aggressive Tactics

Ms. Treber is dismayed by how aggressively Pick-A-Prof has pushed the university hand over professors' grade distributions. A company representative even told university computer officials that Pick-A-Prof could analyze students' grades, she says.

Kimberly A. McGrain, a sophomore student senator at Frostburg, says she and other student leaders are planning to seek the president's permission for the grading data. "I have complete faith in this getting worked out," she says. She adds that Pick-A-Prof has been "nice enough" to post evaluations of Frostburg professors even though the Student Government Association has not paid the company, and says that the association is prepared to pay should it obtain and post the grade data.

Besides what Pick-A-Prof earns from student-government associations and individual student subscriptions, the service also draws income from online sales. Pick-A-Prof has established a partnership with eCampus.com, an online bookstore, to encourage students to buy books, movies, and other merchandise. The company also works with university bookstores.

Over lunch at Gueros, a landmark Mexican restaurant in Austin, Mr. Chilek says that Pick-A-Prof is making money. He won't say how much, but clearly the business is growing. The company has doubled its work force to 14, and is moving its office to accommodate the larger staff and be closer to the Austin campus.

"We're entirely stable," says Mr. Chilek. "We're not going away."

Mr. Chilek and Ms. Bragg say they are trying to expand their business by having more professors use Pick-A-Prof's Web site to post their biographies, course syllabuses, and office hours, and to communicate with students. Professors at some universities already use the service in that way, they say.

Why would professors need such a service when they have their own Web sites for communicating with students? Mr. Maizlish asks. "We can do that without this commercial venture."