OLIVIA RASH
rashol@lopers.unk.edu
When you have a bad experience during a meal at a local dinery, you talk to a manager, get a meal compensated or leave a Yelp review hoping for change. If someone offered you the chance to do more than log onto RateMyProfessor and have a bigger impact on your educational environment would you do it?
RateMyProfessor, a review site that allows college and university students to rate their professors and campuses in America, Canada and the UK, was started in 1999 by John Swapceinski, a software engineer from Menlo Park, California. The site has over 19 million reviews for 1.7 million professors. UNK’s campus is rated 3.7 with safety, facilities and happiness rated at 4.0 or higher.
I asked students on UNK’s campus if given the opportunity to grade a professor, how often would you want to grade them?
Seth Taylor, a senior at UNK, studying Business Administration with an Emphasis in Marketing, said “three to four times would be adequate. It would give the professor feedback on how students think the class is going and gives them time to react. Just like a student, they could have the opportunity to turn their situation in class around for a better evaluation in the end.”
Ellie Morrison, a UNK sophomore studying wildlife biology agreed, saying that “once or twice in the middle of the semester would be super helpful, to be honest. Even the chance to give positive feedback is good, because that helps them know what is working well in addition to what might need changing.”
Students currently feel as if evaluations are a waste of time with the “end of the semester” formal evaluation system as they are unable see the impact from any comments or suggestions made about a professor, students don’t get to experience any changes professors may or may not implement and don’t feel like their words make a difference. This is tragic as student perceptions of the professor are often the most candid and valuable.
As students, we are the consumers paying for the services UNK provides. The most valuable of those services is our education from our professors. If our time and money is being wasted due to a poor professor, we should have a huge say in the matter.
