"He Will Crush You Like an Academic Ninja!": Exploring Teacher Ratings on Ratemyprofessors.com

This study examines students' motives for use and perceptions of the web site http://www.ratemyprofessors.com, one of the main sites that allow students to post anonymous ratings of college professors in the United States and Canada. The contents of comments posted to the web site are examined for relationships to numerical ratings on the site and motivations expressed by students for participating in the rating process. Qualitative (focus group interviews) and quantitative (content analysis) investigations are presented. Students' motives for accessing Ratemyprofessors.com include information seeking, convenience, and interpersonal utility. As regards teacher ratings, the results indicate that students were primarily concerned with issues such as instructor competence and the classroom experience.

[1]  Wilbert J. McKeachie,et al.  Research on College Teaching: The Historical Background. , 1990 .

[2]  R. Dukes.  The Effects of Gender, Status, and Effective Teaching on the Evaluation of College Instruction. , 1989 .

[3]  Carla W. Hess,et al.  Satisfaction with processes of collecting student opinions about instruction: The student perspective. , 1990 .

[4]  R. Rice,et al.  Extending the domain of instructional effectiveness assessment in student evaluations of communication courses , 2000 .

[5]  Mohammad Ahmadi,et al.  Business students’ perceptions of faculty evaluations , 2001 .

[6]  A. Rubin.  Audience activity and media use , 1993 .

[7]  T. Feeley.  Evidence of Halo Effects in Student Evaluations of Communication Instruction , 2002 .

[8]  LaRoseRobert,et al.  Understanding Internet usage , 2001 .

[9]  Curt J. Dommeyer,et al.  College Students' Attitudes Toward Methods of Collecting Teaching Evaluations: In-Class Versus On-Line , 2002 .

[10]  J. Nussbaum,et al.  Student Perceptions of Instructor Communication Behaviors and Their Relationship to Student Evaluation. , 1981 .

[11]  Diane G. Symbaluk,et al.  Published student ratings of instruction: Revealing and reconciling the views of students and faculty , 2001 .

[12]  William J. Read,et al.  The Relationship Between Student Evaluations of Teaching and Faculty Evaluations , 2001 .

[13]  Donna M. Talbot,et al.  Understanding Student Evaluations: What All Faculty Should Know , 2001 .

[14]  David J. Martin,et al.  Identifying Significant Predictors of Student Evaluations of Faculty Through Hierarchical Regression Analysis , 2001, The Journal of psychology.

[15]  C. Bachen,et al.  Assessing the role of gender in college students’ evaluations of faculty , 1999 .

[16]  Anselm L. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research : techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory , 1998 .

[17]  Thomas J. Johnson,et al.  Online and in the Know: Uses and Gratifications of the Web for Political Information , 2002 .

[18]  R. LaRose,et al.  Understanding Internet Usage , 2001 .

[19]  Zizi Papacharissi.  The Self Online: The Utility of Personal Home Pages , 2002 .

[20]  John M. Darley,et al.  Developmental aspects in students' course selection , 1999 .

[21]  O. Holsti.  Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities , 1969 .

[22]  A. Rubin,et al.  Predictors of Internet Use , 2000 .

[23]  N. Rao.  The Oh No! Syndrome: A Language Expectation Model of Undergraduates' Negative Reactions toward Foreign Teaching Assistants. , 1995 .

[24]  Douglas A. Ferguson,et al.  The World Wide Web as a Functional Alternative to Television , 2000 .

[25]  Michael J. Beatty,et al.  Are student ratings of communication instructors due to “easy” grading practices?: An analysis of teacher credibility and student-reported performance levels , 1990 .