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CTV News, 4/22/2009

Discovering RamRatings

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Rocky Mountain Collegian, 11/12/2003

Informed or Incompetent?

Students rate their professors

By: Taylour Nelson

In the three years senior mechanical engineering major Andrew Panariso has attended CSU, he has enrolled in classes that reaffirm the reasons he chose to be a mechanical engineering major. He has also enrolled in classes that have made him question his future.

"I've thought, 'is this what I really want to do?'" Panariso said. "Teachers have a lot to do with liking a class. If I had a choice of teachers, I would only take the good ones."

Students can find out opinions on which professors are the "good ones" at ramratings.com, a Web site unaffiliated with CSU, created to allow students to post their opinions about CSU professors.

"It's an important tool that tries to give students a voice," said Kennan Blehm, a senior computer science major and creator of ramratings.com.

A CSU student himself, Blehm also attempted to make professors more aware of their teaching styles through the Web site.

"When a professor is not doing a good job, and is aware of it, I think it has the potential to cultivate change," Blehm said.

Most classes administer a student course survey at the end of the semester. These surveys ask the student to comment on his/her experiences with the professor and the course itself.

Although students can access the statistical information of the course survey through the Associated Students of CSU's Web site, they are not able to access any written comments.

But now they can.

When Blehm started ramratings.com, his vision was to create a useful tool for students to read about professors by reading their peers' opinions.

"I wanted to hear more about the good teachers than the bad teachers," Blehm said. "I wanted to know who would teach a good class."

Blehm modeled the Web site after polyratings.com, a similar site used by students at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, Calif., to evaluate their professors.

Forrest Lanning co-founded polyratings.com in 1998 while living in the residence hall as a freshman at Cal Poly.

"We were looking at Amazon.com and realized that people could read evaluations on books before actually buying them," Lanning said. "We thought it was a good idea; students could evaluate a professor's teaching style and other people could read about it before taking the class."

Soon the site was overflowing with evaluations from students, so many that Lanning and his friends were unable to regulate all the postings.

"Most students did constructive criticism, but some people would post personal information about the professor," Lanning said. "Professors started wondering if it was ethical."

A Web site like ramratings.com could be useful to the CSU faculty, said Alan Tucker, vice provost for faculty affairs at CSU.

"If the written comments are edited, removing derogatory and demeaning postings, the faculty would find it helpful to see a random sample of students talking about their class," he said.

He said that faculty members confident in their teaching might be less affected by comments than those who have had difficulty with students in the past.

Tucker added that the Web site is merely providing a forum for students to communicate with more people.

"It's an online version of conversations that already go on," he said.

But on ramratings.com, there are very few evaluations for each professor, some with none at all.

Brent Reeves, vice president of the Faculty Council, reviewed the Web site and questioned its statistical validity.

"In a class of 180 students, if you get 2 or 3 evaluations it's not indicative of everyone's opinion," Reeves said. "It has potential of being good, but for it to have any statistical validity, it's got to have more samples."

A mycologist professor in the biology department, Reeves said he finds constructive criticism from his students useful.

"We all have room for improvement," he said.

Daniel Wood, a senior engineering major, said he would be wary of the negative comments made about professors on the site.

"You don't know the person (making the comments), or what kind of student they are, so I'd stick to the positive views and what people liked about the teaching," he said. "You can usually tell the intelligent response from (the response of) someone who is just pissed off."

Reeves said the Web site has the potential of being abused, adding that not all the comments should to be taken seriously.

"It's one of those things that will be humorous, and some will get bent out of shape about it," Reeves said. "Students should hold onto their hats, it's going to be a ride."

Rocky Mountain Collegian, 9/8/2003

It's Good to Feel You've Made a Difference

By: Jacob L'Orange

The first weeks of classes have come and gone, and most of us believe we have gotten a feel for what our courses are all about. Some of us have battled RAMweb, trying to rearrange our schedules while others have just shrugged and prepared to ride out the semester. One thing few people have done, however, is evaluate their professors. Being unlucky enough to draw a bad professor is something that can ruin a class, or even an entire semester.

Fortunately for us, there's RamRatings.com, a student-run Web site where students can rate their professors online and read evaluations from other students. Unfortunately for us, it is not very well advertised. At most, all students see of it is a few hastily scrawled chalk letters on the sidewalk at the end of the year. Since most students never see the site until it is too late to do anything about their classes, they rarely take the time to evaluate the professors. The only evaluations currently posted are those from students who either loved their professor enough to write a glowing report, or hated them enough to want to warn other students away.

RamRatings.com runs off of the OpenRatings evaluation engine, using an A through F grading system. It asks three questions: does your professor present material clearly, does the professor respond well to student needs, and finally it asks for an overall grade. It also asks for information about the student, such as what grade they received and why they took the class, information that can be invaluable in determining whether or not the student's advice is sound. A comments box allows an evaluating student to explain just what they loved or hated about their professor. Once students have evaluated a professor, the grades are figured into a GPA for the professor, which is listed alongside the student's comment and made available to the public. The entire site is well laid out, easy to understand, and more concise than end-of-the-year evaluations handed out in class.

The university's only system of evaluation seems to have one goal: providing feedback to the professors. This is fine, except for the fact that it counts for nothing other than emotional release for you and free birdcage liner for your favorite professor. These evaluations are written by students but never seen by students, so they do not help anyone decide whether to stick out an ornery professor, or bail early because there is little chance of doing well in the course. Web sites like RamRatings do not give students a clear picture because so few people have contributed their opinions. It would be simple for the university to change the questions on the evaluation to be clearer and compile information that students care about. Having somebody run the sheets through a Scantron reader then post the results online would be quick and easy feedback for students. Will such a thing happen within our lifetimes? Probably not. But until then, we have sites like RamRatings.com. Spend a few minutes and rate your old instructors. Your classmates will thank you for it.

Rocky Mountain Collegian, 9/25/2002

Ramratings.com allows students to praise or disgrace professors

By: Spencer Goodfriend

However, ramratings.com was created this summer for exactly that reason. Since going public last week, the site has had 124 evaluations on 1,117 professors. 95 percent of CSU professors are compiled and awaiting evaluations.

The site is student run, and is not affiliated with CSU or the Associated Students of CSU. The site is part of the Open Source Professor Rating Engine Project, OpenRatings, of which junior computer science major Kennan Blehm, is the developer.

"The intentions of ramratings.com is to provide the students of CSU with a resource to share and gather information about their professors-the good and the bad," Blehm said. "When students can view what made a professor good or bad for other students, it can often help them make critical decisions about their future class schedules."

Faculty and staff of CSU are denied access to post material to ramratings, Blehm said.

"The service is not for professors, and it is not meant to incorporate professor's views of themselves," he said.

Some students think ramratings.com can be a useful registering tool.

"I like this idea, the teachers are always evaluating us, now it's our turn to evaluate them," said sophomore technical journalism major Holly Truhlar.

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