He will crush you like an academic ninja!

Been meaning to blog this one for a while: "He Will Crush You Like an Academic Ninja!": Exploring Teacher Ratings on Ratemyprofessors.com. It's definitely interesting; here are some excerpts that caught my eye (emphases all mine):

Students also commented on what information they value more at Ratemyprofessors.com: the statistical and visual elements (smileys, numerical ratings, chili peppers, etc.) or the actual written comments. Not surprisingly, students rely more on the written over the non-written portion of the evaluations. The students basically ignore the numerical ratings, but if they look at any, the easiness score is the one most consulted. The smileys, the students noted, are hard to ignore and are good for creating a first impression of the teacher and the course. For example, if the teacher has many "angry" versus "smiley" faces, this appears to influence their opinion of the teacher initially, but they will investigate further to read the actual written comments. The chili peppers are generally disregarded; students reported that they do not place importance on whether or not a teacher is rated as "sexy." One student summarized this idea by stating, "I think the hot tamale thing kind of takes away from the credibility of the site. If you're looking for a professor, obviously their level of attractiveness isn't really a top priority."

[. . .]

[Students] were confident that they could pick out the ones that are fair and honest and the ones that are vengeful and sarcastic.

[. . .]

Besides posting to pass along important information to other students, several of the students mentioned revenge or venting. If they had a bad experience in a certain class with a certain professor, posting to the site was their way passing along information, but also of "getting back" at that instructor. For example, one student shared her reason for posting. "I do it so people won't take that professor, but I think it's more my revenge in a way. It's my way of getting back at them."

[. . .]

One theme that emerged when discussing posting practices was the notion of posting a comment about a professor only if the students really liked or really disliked the professor. "I only post when I have a really strong opinion of a teacher, either really good or really bad," one student reported. In other words, neutral feelings about a professor did not motivate students to post. Students felt reporting about these specific instances would be most useful for other students.

[. . .]

The content of students' comments on the website and the statements recorded in our focus groups demonstrated an overall concern for teacher competence above other considerations such as appearance, race, or gender. Issues such as appearance and personality were less important to students as reflected in the present study. However, appearance and personality were related to ratings and to perceptions of instructors in general. We find confirmation of the primacy of teacher competence in the fact that focus group participants in the present study independently indicated that their posting priorities had to do primarily with the quality of the professors and the content of the courses. We cannot, however, rule out the importance of other factors such as perceptions of a teacher being easy, as we found a strong positive relationship between easiness ratings and overall quality ratings (cf. Felton et al., 2003).

Oh, also: "One interesting finding in [Ahmadi et al. (2001)] is that when asked if the results [of teaching evaluations] should be made public, over two-thirds said yes; students suggested publishing the information in newspapers and on the Internet."