| How do you rate your teachers? (9/05) | | Print | |
| Written by Elan Lavie | |||||
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“Mr. Hathwell is simply the most brilliant, arrogant, exciting and amazing English teacher ever,” an anonymous source states. “If his class is open when you get to the arena, build your schedule around it.”
RateMyTeachers, which has grown exponentially since it was founded in August 2001 by a California Internet entrepreneur and two teachers, now receives more than 8,000 new ratings per day, according to the site. Students are becoming quite fond of RateMyTeachers, especially at Lowell, where it has become a tool for many self-schedulers. Students have posted over 3,500 teacher ratings for 194 teachers on the site. “If I really don’t know anything about a teacher, I go on the site to look at how much work they give and whether or not they have a good atmosphere in the classroom,” junior Christine Sierra said.
Although no lawsuits have been filed against RateMyTeachers, attempts to take similar Web sites to court have been made. In 2000, two instructors at City College of San Francisco filed a lawsuit against Teacher Review, a review site for college professors, because several ratings were posted that were extremely offensive to a gay English teacher. The charges were dropped a few months later because the Communications Decency Act of 1996 gives immunity to Webmasters who run open forums online. Since the ratings were anonymous, the instructors had no case.
However, the Lowell site does include ratings by students who bash their teachers for revenge. One student, who wished to remain anonymous, admitted that he gave a teacher the lowest possible rating because he was upset about the grade he received. “I thought I deserved an ‘A,’ but I was given a ‘B,’ so I went on the site and rated him all ones.” RateMyTeachers believes teacher bashing is not a serious problem, claiming that about 70 percent of teacher’s ratings are favorable. This seems to be true for Lowell where the average teacher quality rating is 3.7 out of five. English teacher David Hathwell looked at the site and its effects on the teaching community. “I wish the site were less of a polling booth for a teacher popularity contest — who’s cool, cooler, coolest. That puts us in a bad, competitive relationship with one another.” Problems on the site for students are simpler. “Everyone has different opinions,” sophomore Nick Rosenheim said. “I’ve taken teachers who were rated highly but ended up disliking them, and I’ve taken teachers who were rated poorly but ended up really liking them. From now on, I might just go with the opposite of what the site says.” Hathwell admits though, “I couldn’t help but see the gallery of faces and gloat that mine wasn’t green.”
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to listen.



