Disgruntled professors are fighting back against professor-rating Web sites by creating a site of their own.
The blogging site Rate My Students is a place on the Web where professors can post about the complaints and struggles of being an educator. On the Web site, bloggers remain anonymous and the comments about their students can be scathing.
Someone who identified as a tenure-track English professor from a Minnesota school had some complaints about students.
The professor’s post read, “As a group, you’re lazy, unmotivated, and you are eager to lie to my face about the most minor of matters. You treat me with such casual disrespect – tardiness, phony stories about missing class, casual plagiarism – and yet you – and your parents – expect me to treat you like rare geniuses in my care.”
University English professor Michael Dennis Browne said this person might have psychological problems and could be taking it out on students.
“This professor sounds disturbed to me and should try another career,” he said.
Browne said he doesn’t see the function of having anonymous Web sites such as Rate My Students and Rate My Professors.
“I think anonymity lets the bugs scurry out from under the stones,” he said.
English professor Brian Goldberg said there’s no way to know who is posting things online.
“Frankly, I don’t know if it’s a professor who posted that,” Goldberg said.
He said it would be a whole other issue if the bloggers mentioned students’ names.
Joel Weinsheimer, also an English professor, said he really questions whether the Web site really promotes teaching.
“If (as a student) I read I was lazy, unmotivated and eager to lie to your face, I would not be much inclined to learn more in this class,” he said.
Weinsheimer also said that just because professors have a right to post, it doesn’t make it OK.
“We have the right to do all sorts of things, but it doesn’t make it right, doesn’t make it professional,” he said.
Pharmacy first-year Angie Henderson said she agrees with professors’ having the right to post their opinions online.
“If a student can make comments about professors, why can’t it go the other way around?” she said.
