RateMyProfessors.com offers biased evaluations

In support of RMP, Otto, Sanford, and Ross (2008) recently argued that RMP eval-uations are likely a valid method of assessing professor performance. They suggestedthat RMP ratings may contain little or no bias based on student self-selection. On theother side of this debate, Felton et al. (2008) argued that students who post on RMPare self-selected and even irresponsible. The authors reported that professor quality(average of helpfulness and clarity ratings) correlates both with hotness (attractive-ness) and easiness, making the website useless. Further, since the same students whopost on RMP are completing in-class evaluations, both sets of evaluations are suspect.We suggest that self-selection of raters on RMP creates quite a different studentprofile than what would be found in the classroom, allowing in-class evaluations toremain the gold standard.In order to examine possible bias, we might compare in-class evaluations withRMP evaluations. Timmerman (2008) compared RMP ratings for professors with apublic post of traditional faculty evaluations and found the two surveys to be corre-lated. Similarly, Brown, Baillie, and Fraser (2009) reported moderate-to-strongcorrelations between in-class and RMP evaluations; however, approximately 60% ofthe variability of in-class evaluations was not explained by RMP reports. In bothstudies, the authors attempted to match the constructs of helpfulness, clarity andeasiness on the two types of surveys even though university instruments did notspecifically offer items like those found on RMP. Regardless of the correlationsbetween in-class and RMP surveys, students tended to rate professors higher on bothhelpfulness and clarity when completing in-class evaluations as compared to whe

Does ratemyprofessor.com really rate my professor?

RateMyProfessors.com offers biased evaluations