Turning the Tables: Using RateMyProfessors.com as a Teaching Tool in the Community College Classroom

Y

7

College Students; Student Evaluation of Teacher Performance; College Faculty; Teacher Evaluation; Teacher Attitudes; Grades (Scholastic); Web Sites; Tests; Scores

0146-3934

College students use online sources to obtain information about their institution's professors when preparing their schedules for the upcoming semester. While there is some disagreement among educators as to the validity of these student evaluations, students appear to find them to be quite useful. Might these evaluations, however, prove to be useful for professors? In this article, one professor explains how he shared his previous semester's evaluations with his current students and stated that he was able to predict, in the second week of the semester, which of his current students would write the best and the worst of the evaluations about him at semester's end. He then announced an intention to reduce the number of future negative evaluations simply by allowing the students to retake a short quiz which was given after the text's introductory chapter had been covered. With 60% of the students electing to retake the quiz and almost all of them seeing a significant improvement in their quiz scores, the result was an increase in final course grades of A and B and a reduction of F grades.

As Provided

2018

EJ1171605