As printed recently by Inside Higher Education, a commentary by Prof. James Miller at Smith College raises a very good point -- in order to balance the potentially biased information regarding professors on sites like RateMyProfessor.com, colleges should make their own course evaluations public and provide students with all the information, rather than having them rely on just a few potentially biased ones:

Bad information flourishes when good information is suppressed. . . . When colleges withhold their own internally administered student evaluations from students, they have the effect of colleges boosting the importance of RateMyProfessors.com. . . .

Most colleges already administer high-quality student evaluations of professors and they should release this data so students could make more intelligent class choices. . . .

The current generation of college students consults customer reviews before buying books, seeing movies or downloading music. We should expect and perhaps even encourage them to also use customer reviews when picking classes.

The commentary goes on to describe how students’ reviews on sites like RateMyProfessor.com can have a disproportionate effect on teaching when a relatively small number of negative reviews can influence other students not to take a certain course, which then reduces enrollment for that professor, which then is seen as a negative by the college’s administration.

Like I’ve said before, I don’t object to sites like RateMyProfessor.com but I also don’t care to go there and see what my students say about me because I realized long ago that, in the words of Bill Cosby, “I don’t know what’s the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

At the same time, I think professors should have an equal opportunity to respond to sites like that and the negative and biased reviews that are posted about them. For example, I am almost certain that for the majority of professors who have more negative than positive reviews on sites like RateMyProfessor.com, their full course evaluations will probably reveal just the opposite -- more positive comments than negative ones.

Therefore, I agree with Prof. Miller that making college-administered course evaluations public would be one effective way of “leveling” the playing field and will give students a much more accurate and representative picture of a certain professor’s skills as a teacher.