Bad Professors (and good ones too)

[mattgreenecomposer]

I had a great idea for a website but  it already exists!!    ratemyprofessors.com  So Im glad this exists, especially for students on the graduate level.  Professors who have tunure especially need to be held accountable for their actions.   Hopefully sites like this one will  put education back in the market place of competition and even professors with tenure will realize they are not doing their job if nobody signs up for their class in the future.

The teacher evaluations are such a joke at the end of each semester.  Everyone is identifiable especially at the graduate level when class sizes are 5 or 6 people.  What can a student do? answer, nothing.  The system needs something like this where students can express their opinion and teachers will feel they can't get away with anything.  Perhaps even the media will jump on it and report teacher ratings that are exceptionally low and these people will get fired.
On the other hand.  Teachers who are exceptional should be rewarded.  and maybe they'll get a raise or promotion of this.
The site is rather difficult to use however.  There aren't that many professors listed (although you can e-mail them to add yours) The forum is slow, and registration is a hassle.  I feel it could be much better. 
Does anyone know when this site got started?

[quantum]

I've used it occasionally.

Reminds me of a prof that well known throughout the faculty and university for that matter because of the number of complaints about his teaching.  Unfortunately I had him for a prof. 

[mattgreenecomposer]

It's for good professors. too.  The idea is if someone is doing a great job, they can be rewarded eventually by people coming to that school to study with them in large #'s.  Eventually that might raise enough interest for more $$money to go to that department instead of, say, the football team.

This website would have to become very poplular for that to happen, but I see it as helping everyone out.  Imagine if it was as popular as YouTube or Facebook, a multi-billion dollar company, and your piano professor was on the home page as being in the top 10 rated teachers in the country by students that have had them.  I think it would be something to brag about for that school and especially the music department to say.."look we have members of our department on the top 10 list everyweek on this website rated by the people.  We want more money from the school to support us and buy new pianos, practice rooms, whatever."

[arensky]

Well that was interesting; looked up old teachers and classmates who are now teachers and for the most part I found myself agreeing with the students' opinions of them whether they were good or bad in my own opinion. One was upsetting; one of the best teachers I ever had is generally despised by the students currently at that school but I attribute that to the low quality of undergraduate students at that institution and the excellence of the teacher in question; I always felt that she deserved a better (or more appropriate) place than she had. Unfortunately she is a Rennalssance and Baroque scholar teaching at a music ed oriented state college. Therefore most of the students' comments about her (they were not all bad) are not relevant imo; they were from that type of student who couldn't care less about music history before John Williams; there were (and obviously still are) many students like that there when I was a grad student. There is also a generational problem in this instance; her high standards and level of intellect don't fit in with today's "lite" approach to many aspects of academia. She is a much better teacher than this site tells the reader. So this sort of thing is a problem with "ratemyprofessors.com"; the reader should realize that they may not be getting the whole picture in certain cases.

I am not yet included in this site, but I am sure that I would receive varying reactions from students, as I do in my annual student evaluations.