Does ratemyprofessor.com really rate my professor?

Otto, James; Sanford, Douglas; Ross, Douglas N.

doi:10.1080/02602930701293405

Cited by 94 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…In support of RMP, Otto, Sanford, and Ross (2008) recently argued that RMP evaluations are likely a valid method of assessing professor performance. They suggested that RMP ratings may contain little or no bias based on student self-selection.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

RateMyProfessors.com offers biased evaluations

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Wilson

2012

Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

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RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is becoming an increasingly popular tool among students, faculty and school administrators. The validity of RMP is a point of debate; many would argue that self-selection bias obscures the usefulness of RMP evaluations. In order to test this possibility, we collected three types of evaluations: RMP evaluations that existed at the beginning of our study, traditional in-class evaluations and RMP evaluations that were prompted after we collected in-class evaluations. We found differences in the types of evaluations students provide for their professors for both perceptions of professor clarity and ratings of professor easiness. Based on these results, conclusions drawn from RMP are suspect and indeed may offer a biased view of professors. IntroductionStudent evaluations are an important part of the feedback process for university professors. Implications of positive student evaluations include pay raises for professors, advancement to tenure status and improved marketability when applying for new teaching positions. Student evaluations also offer professors vital feedback to enhance teaching. For these reasons, the importance of student evaluations is evident.Universities and colleges have several options regarding how to administer their student evaluations of professors. It is common for universities to use traditional inclass evaluations in which students use pencil and paper to provide feedback about their professors. However, as more universities begin to move towards a paperless environment, institutions may instead use online evaluations. Most online evaluations offer students a chance to provide feedback about professors at a location and time of their choice, reduce time constraints and reduce potential influence from the professor (Anderson, Cain, and Bird 2005). Online evaluations also decrease the problem of students who do not get the chance to complete in-class evaluations if they miss class during evaluation day.The use of online evaluations versus traditional in-class evaluations raises questions regarding similarity in responses across the two methods of presentation. Student ratings of professors have been shown to be similar across the two formats when the professor requests the evaluations (Donovan, Mader, and Shinsky 2006). However, Donovan and colleagues found that the content of comments provided by students differed depending upon whether the evaluation was online or in class.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

RateMyProfessors.com offers biased evaluations

Legg

Wilson

2012

Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

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“…Although these sources are tempting, a question remains about their validity. Otto, Sanford, and Ross (2008) published research that went directly to the issue by asking the rhetorical question, 'Does ratemyprofessor.com really rate my professor? ' This question takes on an important relevance for three reasons.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Assumptions of the validity of teaching evaluations, even online sources, should be aggressively and empirically challenged. Otto, Sanford, and Ross (2008), in their effort to investigate the evaluation validity of ratemyprofessors.com, took an interesting tack. They chose this site because of its popularity and large size, but the information offers no direct measure of teaching effectiveness, only measures on a five-point ordinal scale of 'helpfulness', 'clarity' and 'easiness', and a rather ambiguous nominal measure called 'hotness'.…”

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confidence: 99%

What does ratemyprofessors.com actually rate?

Clayson

2013

Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

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“…Although validity of SET instruments has been a controversial issue due to several confounding factors related to instructor, course, and student (Addison, Bet, &Warrington, 2006;Baldwin & Blattner, 2003;Otto et al, 2008), SET scores are mostly considered to be reliable (Alaemoni 1999;Hobson & Talbot, 2001). However, as discussed in this paper, there are some problems associated with the reliability of SET scores.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Reliability-Related Issues in the Context of Student Evaluations of Teaching in Higher Education

Kalender

2015

IJHE

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Student evaluations of teaching (SET) have been the principal instrument to elicit students' opinions in higher education institutions. Many decisions, including high-stake ones, are made based on SET scores reported by students. In this respect, reliability of SET scores is of considerable importance. This paper has an argument that there are some problems in choosing and using of reliability indices in SET context. Three hypotheses were tested: (i) using internal consistency measures is misleading in SET context since the variability is mainly due to disagreement between students' ratings, which requires use of inter-rater reliability coefficients, (ii) number of minimum feedbacks is not achieved in most of the classes, resulting unreliable decisions, and (iii) calculating reliability coefficient assuming a common factor structure across all classes is misleading because a common model may not be tenable for all. Results showed that use of internal consistency only to assess reliability of SET scores may result in wrong decisions. Considerable large numbers of missing feedbacks were observed to achieve acceptable reliability levels. Findings also indicated that factorial model differed across several groups.

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Does ratemyprofessor.com really rate my professor?

Cited by 94 publications

References 18 publications

RateMyProfessors.com offers biased evaluations

RateMyProfessors.com offers biased evaluations

What does ratemyprofessors.com actually rate?

Reliability-Related Issues in the Context of Student Evaluations of Teaching in Higher Education

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