Professor reviews should lose top-secret status

For years, UCLA students have used bruinwalk.com or ratemyprofessor.com to find information on their prospective professors in order to decide if they should take a professor’s class or not. However, such ratings are not entirely accurate and as such, students should have a more reliable source for this information.

Specifically, the UCLA administration should begin releasing the results of end-of-quarter teacher evaluations so students can have information on professors that is not completely skewed. Indeed, if students are going to try to get information on professors anyway, it would be best for them to get the most accurate assessment possible.

While bruinwalk.com may seem helpful, in reality the postings are skewed to either reflect a high admiration for professors or a strong dislike of them.

“I use bruinwalk as a general evaluation of professors, but I also take into account that the students who go on bruinwalk either hate the professor or love the professor,” said Kevin Kuo, a third-year communication studies student.

Such an assessment seems to be in line with many of the postings on bruinwalk. For instance, on one professor’s page, a student described this professor as a “boring, monotonous lecturer.” However, just one comment down was a posting that said this professor was “one of the best teachers at UCLA.”

Needless to say, all of this bias for or against a professor is not good for students trying to get information about classes. Furthermore, the bias causes dishonest, one-sided representations of professors.

There are a number of reasons it would not only be more helpful for students, but also to professors, if the school were to publish the results from its quarterly teacher evaluations. Foremost, making the results of these evaluations open to UCLA students would provide them with more comprehensive information regarding professors.

“I would trust an official publication coming from the college itself more than I trust independent sources like bruinwalk,” said first-year biology student Sami Shahhal.

Also, on bruinwalk, students are only given five categories: effectiveness, difficulty, concern for student learning, availability and overall recommendation to rate professors, along with space to write general comments. However, on the end-of-quarter evaluations, students are given many more specific criteria by which to score professors, such as use of technology or how well the reading material pertains to lecturing. These results can provide information to students on more in-depth concerns rather than just vaguely how difficult one professor is.

Furthermore, these scores are likely much more accurate than any score on bruinwalk. Whereas the scores on bruinwalk are based on a small number of the overall student body, these evaluations reflect every single student who had that professor. Not to mention students would put more effort into evaluations if they could benefit from them.

“Students would probably be more likely to answer honestly if they could see the evaluations later,” Shahhal said. “If students knew they could benefit from these results they would have more of a reason to complete the questions as best they could.”

Implementing such a program would not be very difficult. Already, the Office of Instructional Development collects these evaluations to make them available for professors to improve on their classroom skills; it would not be that much of a stretch to make them available to students as well.

To make this process easier, mandatory teacher evaluations could be administered through students’ MyUCLA accounts. Then, the processing of data would be easy. Plus, all classes already require students to use their MyUCLA accounts.

Finally, allowing students to see these anonymous evaluations would give students a better way to judge which responses to take to heart. For instance, if someone came across a negative evaluation that also indicated the evaluating student never went to class, the prospective student would know not to give as much weight to it.

As made clear by the heavy use of bruinwalk among UCLA students, there is already an existing demand among the student body for information about professors. It would be in the school’s best interest to provide reliable information for its students so they did not have to turn to Web sites that never give an accurate portrayal of anyone, be it good or bad.

If you want to see teacher evaluations, e-mail Margolis at mmargolis@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.

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