When signing up for classes, Regina Rogers, a first-year communications studies student and a member of the women’s basketball team, asks her teammates which professors they think will be understanding about her hectic schedule.
“A lot of professors are not willing to work with athletes,” Rogers said. “I don’t use anything like bruinwalk.com, just word of mouth.”
Many students on campus, though, find professor evaluation Web sites, such as bruinwalk.com and ratemyprofessors.com, coupled with feedback from friends, to be very helpful in choosing classes.
These Web sites allow students to rate professors on their effectiveness, availability, and concern for students, and students can also write comments about professors’ teaching styles.
When using these Web sites, students said they look for a variety of characteristics, but an important quality for most is a professor’s ability to teach difficult concepts effectively.
When scoping out professors, Annalise Ashdown, a first-year history student, makes sure they are able to deliver their lectures in a cohesive format.
“Clarity in lecture and organization are most important to me,” she said.
Lucy Chow, a fifth-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student, said for her an effective professor is someone who cares about the students and is enthusiastic about the material.
Though Chow said she looks at scheduling issues and advice from her friends first, she also looks at online evaluations.
“I usually look mostly at the students’ comments when looking at bruinwalk.com to choose a professor and to see what their teaching style is,” Chow said.
While some students said they use online evaluations to search for easy classes, many said they would actually prefer a harder class to an easy “A” taught poorly.
“For me easiness is not as important as fairness,” said Andrew Valle, a fifth-year biology student. “I do not mind hard professors as long as I learn a lot and the grading is fair.”
The end-of-the-quarter evaluations that students are required to fill out, rating the class and the professor, are helpful in showing professors what aspects of their teaching style they need to work on. Some departments even allow students to see the compiled results.
The results are processed and sent back to the professors a month later with all of their scores and comments, along with statistics so professors can evaluate how they are doing compared with the rest of the department, Vice Chancellor for Academic Personnel Tom Rice said.
Many professors said they do make changes based on the evaluations. Physics Professor Huan Huang has been teaching at UCLA for 12 years and values all of the feedback he gets from students each quarter, though he admits that he cannot make all the changes his students recommend.
“Sometimes it is difficult because the complaints are about my accent, which is hard to change,” he said.
Economics Professor Edward McDevitt agreed that faculty, as well as the departments, really examine the results, and evaluations are not just a formality.
“I can’t speak for every professor, but I take the evaluations very seriously,” he said.
UCLA also has programs to assist professors with their teaching skills, said Rice, and the university encourages department heads to work with faculty that consistently perform low.
“The promotion process is based on research, teaching and service, so faculty who are poor teachers will want to improve to increase their chances of promotion,” Rice said.
Math Professor Ronald Miech said he took student approval into account when placing professors in certain classes when he was the undergraduate vice chair for the department.
“The evaluations have an effect on most professors,” Miech said. “I have been around for a very long time, since 1964, but I definitely read through them all.”
He said he feels confident that most professors in the math department are effective teachers.
“Overall at any given time we might have at most two out of 80 professors that are, let’s say, not noted for strong teaching skills,” he said.
When it comes down to it, though, students tend to judge the professors a tad harder. The overall rating for the math department on bruinwalk.com is actually 6.47, with 13 out of 200 professors receiving an overall rating of three or lower.