I was amused when I showed up on the rate your professor site with great ratings but I didn't get the hot chili pepper! Awwwwww. I was also amused by the fact that one of the most attractive professors in the department received maximum scores across the board and hot chili peppers!

Just the fact that the four questions asked of students on ratemyprofessors.com are "easiness," "helpfulness," "clarity," and "hotness" is telling--and, in my screening of the site last night (I looked for friends at Tennessee and at Minnesota), I didn't see *one* bad rating coupled with a hot chili pepper, only bad ratings, average ratings, good ratings, and good w/chili pepper.

CultureCat

If students' opinions are so valid and meaningful that we use them to determine if professors get hired or promoted, maybe we should seek their opinion on other subjects. For example, what literature, if any, do students think is worth studying? Must we read books to learn history, or can we just watch the History Channel?

While we're asking students these questions, we can ask them how much of their tuition they think should go to administrators. Perhaps the high salaries paid to University presidents and the like could be better spent hiring pop stars to perform on campus?

Hmmm. I've certainly had a few students before who didn't care about school and were only there because their parents expected them to go to college--who told me so, in fact, but I don't find this assumption about students in general (namely that they don't want to learn and that their uninformed opinions shouldn't matter much) very useful for me in my teaching practice. I think it's easier to have high expectations; it makes teaching less of an uphill battle. I know you're not really trying to indict students here so much as administrators who don't take a more holistic approach to hiring and promotion, but I think, for the most part, and there are exceptions, that student opinions are valid and meaningful, and that their evaluations should be taken seriously. Of course, ratemyprofessor.com's categories shouldn't be taken as seriously as ones like "Instructor's success in getting you to think" and "Instructor's attention to what helps you learn," etc.

CultureCat

I agree that a positive attitude is essential--we all learn better from professors or teachers who are enthusiastic about their subject. However, student evaluations are about as meaningful as the homecoming court was in high school--the type of success measured by these evaluations has little to do with education, but more to do with popularity and charisma.

Teachers who are experts in their fields, but who lack the charm, etc., are dismissed as easily by students as "nerds and geeks" were in high school.