In our day and age, with communication channels so free and connected, it is easy to get to know someone before you meet them. With a world of data at our fingertips, we can easily research a person, whether that be through Google images, social media platforms, etc., and find a plethora of information pertaining to their looks, personality, and interests before ever having our first in-person interaction. We are easily able to gain a sense of each person through various search engines and with little effort exerted.
In college, what I have come to understand, is that the same sort of thing goes for professors. During peak registration times, the site RateMyProffessors.com and all GroupMes start blowing up with requests for teacher recommendations. A student will provide the class they are going to take and the professors they are considering, and older students will pitch in, offering their perspective on the teacher based off of their experiences. This makes things easier, especially for the Freshman who don't know anything about scheduling or the classes/professors to avoid.
By using internet sites and GroupMes, we are able to choose professors that have been highly rated by past students, and avoid those that are harsh graders and create impossible tests. Although it is entirely about the student as well, and one can't blame their progress solely on the instructor, a teacher can easily make or break your grade. With this accessibility to information, come registration time, students are able to avoid traumatic scheduling mistakes, and choose classes they are confident in.
The difficult thing, however, is that students seem to only write reviews on professors they absolutely loved or absolutely hated. The majority of reviews are on either end of the spectrum, and the rest are left in the middle, in a grey area of "just okay". From my experiences, when I search for a teacher on RateMyProfessors.com, I see red and green, and rarely yellow. Students give 5.0s to professors they adored, those who were "easiest" or had the clearest grading criteria, and 1.0s to those they hated, the ones that destroyed them on their tests and contributed to the plummeting of their GPA.
The middle professors, who are often the ones left after the first few rounds of registration, are harder to find. They either exist on RateMyProfessors but have no grades, only have a few ratings but it's for the wrong classes, or they don't exist at all. This makes it challenging for students to choose a teacher, as they are pretty much going in blind. As students, we don't exactly feel the need to rate professors that are just mediocre, we'd rather spend our time hyping up an awesome teacher, or ripping a bad one apart. These tendencies create challenges once registration comes around.
To band together and attempt to force tens of thousands of kids to start writing evaluations on the mediocre teachers would be a bit challenging, but there is a different approach that could help bridge this gap. The University of Alabama sends out a survey for students to fill out, evaluating each class and their professor, but the data collected from these surveys is not public knowledge. Instead, it is used by directors of programs, school officials, etc., in order to improve their classes and understand if professors are successfully doing their jobs.
While this information, of course, is useful to the University, I believe it would be incredibly useful to the students as well. If we had access to this information, we could not only find the most sought-after professors and avoid the stricter ones, but we could have information regarding that middle section of professors, the "unreported" per say. Students could steer clear of the sometimes negative results of choosing a teacher blind, by knowing more about them before they go in.
Each student is different and has a different learning style, and each professor teaches in a different manner. It would be best to have this data about professors open to the public so that students can find professors whose teaching style aligns with their learning techniques. For example, a student who learns best from visual representations may get stuck in a class that is solely based on lectures. This wouldn't maximize that student's abilities in the subject or expose them to the information in the most efficient way possible.
It is important, of course, for students to be able to adapt to different teaching methods and adjust as they go from class to class but if we had this data, we could further prepare ourselves for the semester ahead and students could fulfill their potentials at all levels, in every subject.
