Originally published October 15 2005
New website allows students to grade professors
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Many scholars are threatening lawsuits after reading what students wrote on the highly popular RateMyProfessors website. Students can rate a teacher's clarity, helpfulness, level of difficulty and whether a teacher is "hot."
Such are some of the comments posted on RateMyProfessors -- a 6-year-old site that archives student critiques of most popular and least liked profs.
With a database of more than 4 million ratings at more than 5,000 institutions of higher learning, the website has become a staple for many college students who use it to choose classes based on professors' evaluations.
John Swapceinski, the site's founder, says he gets lawsuit threats "pretty much on a weekly basis" (though no actual suits), for publishing allegedly defamatory comments.
Swapceinski, who started the site as a student at San Jose State University, still runs RateMyProfessors while juggling a day job as a Java programmer.
"By and large, RateMyProfessors is unmentionable in university administrations," said Kenneth Westhues, a sociology professor at the University of Waterloo who completed a study of the rating site last year.
Westhues finds that professors and administrations are "deeply threatened" by the site in part because work with students has generally been a very minor part of a faculty member's evaluation.
When doling out grants of tenure, promotions and raises, universities look mainly at a professor's scholarship and publications.
At his university, Robie said he and many of his colleagues suspect that one faculty member has been doctoring colleagues ratings to make his or her own appear more favorable.
Across RateMyProfessors, he believes there is more than enough defamatory material to launch a class action suit against the site and the people posting the offensive comments.
He said the site filters out obscene language, deletes multiple posts on professors that appear to be coming from the same computer, and signs up volunteer student administrators to monitor comments posted at their universities.
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