By Jonathan Stankiewicz
Dr. David Cappella, a recently tenured CCSU English professor, is in his 42nd year teaching. He has been frustrated for years by the advent of websites such as ratemyprofessor.com, “RMP,” because he feels it is “self-selective evaluation.”
“I was teaching at Rhode Island College when it first came out,” said Cappella, “and all the professors were talking about it. I have real problems with it; it’s not real. You either love the person or you hate the person, it’s not a true evaluation.”
Cappella feels as though websites like RMP hinder the art of teaching. “If you start playing to the crowd and I started teaching according to what students want, students wouldn’t learn anything and I wouldn’t be a good teacher. It’s like a ball player or anybody that’s an artist trying to cater to the crowd then you lose authenticity. And you lose reality. You lose yourself. I won’t do that,” Cappella said.
Most students today know that RMP, currently owned by MTV, is the largest online professor rating source with more than 6,500 schools and over 10 million comments from college students in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom. Students can “like” it on Facebook, “follow” it on Twitter, and even download the app to their iPhones.
Students are able to rate professors on several dimensions: ‘Easiness,’ ‘Helpfulness,’ ‘Clarity,’ and their own interest in the class. The lowest score is 0, the highest 5. The easiness category is not included in the scoring.
“The Overall Quality rating is the average of a teacher’s helpfulness and clarity ratings, and is what determines the type of ‘smiley face’ that the teacher receives,” says RMP.
Responses can be anonymous, as they usually are, but students have the option of registering an account.
Today, over 1,200 CCSU professors are rated on RMP with an average professor rating of 3.25.
“The professors that I know here that are good are damn good! There are some damn good teachers in this school,” Cappella said.
“There are also some people that are on cruise control and the students know who they are. So that’s got nothing to do with Rate My Professor, the students really know who’s good.”
However, Cappella later mentioned that part of his problem with RMP is that students are the individuals rating professors.
“Students have told me, ‘I’ve heard about you from my roommate and I trust my roommate because she has good judgment. The other kid that said something about you, well, he’s an idiot anyway and no one listens to him.’ Those are the kids that go on Rate My Professor, generally speaking. They are the ones that go on and say ‘Cappella threw a book at me. He made me cry.’ Jesus. Get a life!”
In 2008, the study “An empirical test of the validity of student evaluations of teaching made on RateMyProfessors.com” argued that there are similarities between RMP and IDEA, a student evaluation system used run by a non-profit group affiliated with Kansas State University. The analysis was conducted by Michael E. Sonntag, who formerly taught at Lander University, and by two current Lander psychology professors, Jonathan F. Bassett and Timothy Snyder.
“The IDEA Center is a non-profit organization whose mission is to serve colleges and universities committed to improving learning, teaching, and leadership performance,” according to The IDEA Center’s website.
IDEA has a ‘Student’s Rating Of Instruction’ service that tailors each report to each specific teacher and helps to look at instruction in terms of learning outcomes. This is intended to give the power to teachers rather than students.
In an April 2008 article in the trade magazine Inside Higher ED, Scott Jaschik presented the results of a study in which RMP ratings were compared with IDEA ratings for 126 professors at Lander University in South Carolina.
“The study rankings on the ease of courses were consistent in both systems and correlated with grades,” Jaschik wrote. “Professors’ rankings for ‘clarity’ and ‘helpfulness’ on RateMyProfessors.com correlated with overall rankings for course excellence on IDEA, and the similarities were such that, the journal article says, they offer ‘preliminary support for the validity of the evaluations on RateMyProfessors.com.’”
“There are two ways to read the results: One is to say that [RMP] is as good as an educationally devised system and the other would be to say that the latter is as poor as the former,” Jaschik said in summarizing the work of one of the study’s researchers.
“Either way…it should give pause to critics to know that the students’ website ‘does correlate with a respected tool,’” Jaschik said.
Cappella has found this to be true in his many years of teaching. He feels that through this generation’s coddling of their children, they have made them less self-sufficient and less proficient critical thinkers.
“I worry about them very much; they’re not dumb, they’re ignorant,” Cappella said. “In providing for their kids, they protected their kids from the world.”
Cappella continued, “When [students] get a ‘D’ they start bitching about the teacher. Instead, they should go home and say, ‘What was the assignment? Why did I get the D?’ Go to the professor and say, ‘I got a D, show me how to do better, to get it up to a C or B.’”
Dr. Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, an expert on the millennial generation, “Generation Me,” argues that “Generation Me’s expectations are highly optimistic: they expect to go to college, to make a lot of money, and perhaps even to be famous.”
Twenge’s book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, voices a concern that many parents are dealing with today. Twenge says that she herself is a part of “Generation Me.”
“Our high expectations, combined with an increasingly competitive world, have led to a darker flip side where we blame other people for our problems and sink into anxiety and depression,” Twenge said.
Cappella agrees with that sentiment.
“Just because you pay for a course to sit in a classroom chair doesn’t mean you’re entitled to get a good grade,” said Cappella. “That’s the privilege of sitting there. It’s a privilege listening to me talk about my field. As it is for every other professor on campus.”
Often when students feel that professors are poor educators, Cappella supposes, it is because the professors have mentally ‘checked out’ of the profession, and are, as he terms them, “walking zombies.”
Cappella does not ever want to be a teacher who is just going through the motions.
“I said a long time ago that if I got really old and didn’t care about teaching then I’d walk out the classroom door and I will,” Capella said. “Fortunately, I’ve still got the fire in the belly. You have to have the fire in the belly to teach on any level.”
Far from being a “walking zombie” of a professor, “Cappy” knows how to keep his class laughing and engaged. Recently, he asked his students why he can’t get a “chili pepper,” an option offered on RMP that marks a professor as physically attractive.
Cappella referenced a past student who has just published her first novel, which she began writing in his class four years earlier. “We have a wonderful job,” Cappella said with a smile.
“I’m at the age now where there are certain things that don’t bother me in the world, that I am trying to simplify my life and make it spiritually meaningful. And so I don’t bother.”
