Personal Development

» RLSharp - professor ratings

Interesting discussion here. I think sites like ratemyprofessor are good if you know what you are looking for. As a rule, all ones and a "Never take him/her" can be dismissed, but you are right that many professors are just hard to understand. There is usually a place for that on evalutions, which ask about how well the professor communicated with the class. However, the real problem, as you said, is not the ratings themselves but the problem of having such teachers in the first place.

They tend to be more common in technical fields, where grants become the main support for keeping a particular professor associated with the university. In liberal arts, they occur most often at more prestigious universities, where a name (in publishing) is more important than teaching skills. But in every case, the student suffers.

One thing that could be done is to actually train professors. Right now, simply having a PhD qualifies you to teach, which is ridiculous. A PhD proves knowledge, but not teaching ability. I think actual training would not only help professors (and by extension students), but also expose to the administration which professors have poor communication skills. Whether they will act on that is another issue. The university is a business nowadays. As such, profits are the name of the game, and grants bring profits.

-- posted by RLSharp

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