As of last Saturday, it is officially Spring. It is the season for Foxfield, narbecues, and outdoor sports, as well as spring advising, which is currently underway for the fall semester. Starting this week and for the next several weeks to come, students will be passed into the hands of their sagacious elders, and in ideal situations, given valuable advice concerning their academic concerns, goals and requirements. However, just like at any large school, advising can be a harrowing journey, particularly for students without a declared major. There’s just only so much that an English professor and pre-Commerce or potential Biology major can accomplish in an advising session.
Fortunately, Web sites like RateMyProfessors.com and the University’s own version of the popular Web site, the Course Forum, have been created to fill in advising gaps. Now students can choose and browse classes by the professor’s rated easiness, fun-factor, clarity, helpfulness, and overall quality and attractiveness.. While these Web sites are useful to an extent, they also inherently flawed. Students should explore the University’s plentiful advising options if they want to find the best quality courses.
The success of Rate My Professors and the Course Forum draws from the simple fact that a good professor can make a course, whereas a bad professor can break not only a course but also a student’s enthusiasm and grade point average. What both Web sites do well is to clearly identify professors who either place way above, or way below, the typical professor. The University is privileged to contain an enormous amount of extremely knowledgeable professors, whose contagious passion for their subject spawns hoards of student admirers and extensive wait lists.
On the flip side, there still are a few underachieving professors at the University whose shortcomings have made them infamous. In these instances, the University could benefit from reading their abysmal ratings on the two student Web sites. Gordon Stewart, the association dean for Bonnycastle and Hanock, said in an e-mail interview, “Online rating services about professors and their courses seem closer in kind to me to online dating services than they do to useful sources of academic advising.” But the University should not immediately dismiss these Web sites. They can be a valuable source of student feedback and information of Professor’s teaching. The Web sites are also to be commended in their utilization of clear, precise grading and candid comment evaluations; something that the University’s online student evaluations could improve on.
Alas, student Web sites can quickly become a crutch rather than a tool for students. According to Stewart, “Rate My Professor might have some utility in terms of reflecting the sense of a course’s immediate reception by students, but I’m not sure how much correspondence there is between that collection of opinions and a course’s (or professor’s) merits. Reviews are suspect, since students are presented with the virtual equivalent of a bathroom stall: a place to vent their personal grudges and vendettas against professors, even if they’ve never even enrolled in or completed the course . . . Finally, The Course Forum provides a helpful but also dangerous resource for students: pie charts showing professor’s grade distribution. It can be difficult to disregard this knowledge when realizing that a professor only awards A’s to less than 2% of a class.
Richard Handler, associate dean for undergraduate programs, had some wise words for students: “If you seek a course that guarantees a good grade, then a pie chart of grade distributions is useful information. If you seek a course that challenges you to think and learn, then you would want different kinds of information. Stewart adds, “Students who want the ‘best’ courses need first to start with some clear thinking about the education they came here to get, then collect lots of information (from peers, sure, but also from syllabi, conversations with prospective faculty, advisers and other faculty), measure their preliminary choices against what’s available and long term goals, and then be prepared to use the add-drop process.” Ultimately, to find the best courses, students should use their learned academic research skills to hunt down useful advisers and faculty, who through age and experience, have knowledge that Web sites never will.
Kendra Kirk’s column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at k.kirk@cavalierdaily.com.
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