Ratemyteachers.com claims to be exactly what its name implies: a site where students can rate their teachers and offer comments on them. There are three five-point scales on which a student can rate his or her teacher: easiness, helpfulness and clarity.
But, in reality, ratemyteachers.com is a forum for students to viciously—and completely anonymously—attack those whose job it is to provide them with an education.
Ratemyteachers.com is an inappropriate solution to a very real problem: students are not offered a forum to constructively critique their teachers. Because of this, resentment festers under the surface and is never addressed in a way that could improve both student and teacher experiences.
But ratemyteachers.com is not a legitimate place for students to voice their opinions on their teacher. To begin with, claiming any merit in their ratings is impossible when viewed in light of the samples they obtain: it’s enough to make any statistician balk.
Firstly, the ratings are an amalgamation of an extremely small, self-selecting group of students—often the students who choose to rate their teacher are those with the strongest opinions of them. Secondly, anonymity allows anyone to make a review without providing any evidence or offering any accountability. Although ratemyteachers.com invites some students to take the role of moderators, students with personal vendettas against their teachers are essentially free to rail on them without fear of repercussion. Furthermore, ratemyteachers.com has no system in place to confine its reviewers to students—feasibly, a teacher could review him or herself. Thirdly, ratemyteachers.com doesn’t provide teachers with any way to address or refute comments made about them. Lastly, ratemyteachers.com represents almost no value to high school students, teachers or administrators. Unlike college students, high school students have very little freedom in choosing their own classes; in many cases, a review of teachers is useless to them. It doesn’t represent any legitimate value to district officials or administrators either: an anonymous online review is not evidence enough to effect any change in teaching staff.
Student Government could provide a forum for students to give feedback to evaluate their teachers. Such a system would be yet another reason to increase the power of student government: they would need the agency to maintain the critics (the students) accountability and objectivity, and preserve the fairness of the system.
Such a system would have to demand accountability from all those who wish to criticize their teachers. A review sheet with mandatory fields for a student’s name and contact information would be submitted by students at the end of the year. These sheets would have thought-provoking questions about the teacher and would require legitimate evidence to be provided to justify each response. Intermediates between the students and the teacher, be they students or other teachers, would review the critiques and contact students to receive verification for any complaint that may require more sufficient evidence or corroboration. Once the legitimacy of the reviews has been sufficiently established, the names would be removed from them and they would then be presented to the teacher. Such a system demands accountability of its participants, while allowing them to speak candidly without fear of repercussion on their grades or a teacher’s attitude towards them.
