E-Valuating Learning: Rate My Professors and Public Rhetorics of Pedagogy

Abstract

The Rate My Professors (RMP) online student discourse community shapes and defines current public rhetorics of pedagogy. RMP is a cultural phenomenon indicative of a larger movement in extra-institutional discourse toward ranking and assessing people and products. More important than the postings on RMP, however, or their measurable accuracy, is how RMP reflects the increasingly convergent interests of consumer culture and academic culture, shaping the ways that pedagogy is valued and assessed by students within the public domain. Faculty therefore must consider RMP's effect on public discourse about pedagogy in order to help students understand evaluation as a tool for civic exchange.

Notes

¹I extend my sincere thanks to the two RR reviewers, Kathleen Blake Yancey and Ed White, who gave me valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

²See Doug Hesse's argument that Amazon's format of rating reviews (that is, “was this review helpful to you?”) “creates a corporate ethos of being helpful and adding value, supplementing the words themselves with one measure of the authors’ reputations. The system of blurbs and ratings mimics, after a fashion, the academic publishing system” (141).

³While RMP is a public site, I felt it important to choose samples from institutions with which I am familiar, deleting the names of the faculty under discussion. In order to reference/document the sources for these comments, however, I do provide links to the postings as they are cited.

⁴For a complete listing of all colleges and universities, see http://onset.byu.edu This site includes a more detailed explanation of how such evaluations are classified and how the overall project is conceptualized, including relevant scholarship on the topic.

⁵In discussion threads on the WPA-L during September 2007, several composition and rhetoric faculty commented on the relative successes and failures of online course evaluation. See https://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0709&L=WPA-L&D=1&T=0&P=63250 for the thread.

⁶As Clawson et al. also argue in their study of student computer-mediated discourse (CMD) in newsgroups that enable cross-university conversations, online discussions as part of a pedagogy can be beneficial—as these groups allow students to “play a proactive role in their own education.” But they additionally note that the prevailing evidence indicates “high-performing” students are the most likely to participate (713). Because dialogue exists does not mean that each exchange is equally operational; in this light, one must weigh the dominance of certain perspectives on RMP, just as one would in face-to-face dialogues.

⁷I freely admit that some postings on RMP are not defensible. The infamous “chili pepper” designation, as well as other offensive (sexist) postings, are certainly neither dialogic nor valuable. However, even as we discount these types of postings, we cannot discount the desire to post, nor say that such surface assessments do not occur outside the electronic confines of RMP. For a fuller discussion of how such ratings may be interpreted, see James Felton et al.’s “Web-Based Student Evaluations of Professors: The Relations Between Perceived Quality, Easiness, and Sexiness.” Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 29.1 (Feb 2004): 91–108.

⁸I have chosen faculty with a significant number of ratings (twenty or more), in addition to varied opinions within those ratings, to allow analysis of emerging patterns within exchanges rather than just two or three limited postings lacking a significant sample set.

⁹I use investor here instead of Deborah Brandt's established notion of sponsor to invoke a more aggressive notion of the economies of higher education often behind large-scale assessments, and the resulting working conditions of faculty, particularly those on contingent funding. I recognize, however, the value in Brandt's seminal term and its larger implications for the social machinery behind the literacies in our students’ home communities, as well as how those communal perceptions of higher education influence not just where or whether students attend college but how they approach the very act of learning itself.