At Cal Poly, Students Rate the Professors on the Internet

Want to know which Cal Poly San Luis Obispo professor “seems a few French fries short of a happy meal?” Which one sometimes barks in class or drinks beer with students at a local pub?

Well, there’s an Internet Web site for you, designed by a couple of Cal Poly roommates who decided that students should know what they’re in for when they sign up for a course.

Their two-month-old site posts anonymous, sometimes caustically humorous, sometimes earnest student evaluations of the university’s faculty.

Student ratings of professors, both formal and informal, have long been standard on campuses nationwide. Now they are migrating to the Internet, that great giver of voice to anyone who can click a mouse.

Under growing pressure to make public the typically confidential, in-class evaluations that students fill out at course end, some institutions, such as Stanford and the University of Washington, have started posting them on the Web or giving data to student association Web sites.

That has not happened at Cal Poly--though it may yet, thanks to the emergence of the underground Web site.

Seniors Forrest Lanning and Doug Dahms say the site grew out of their interest in computers--Dahms is a computer science major--and their frustration with bad professors.

Last year, Lanning, an architectural engineering major from San Jose, said he wound up in a class “that was absolutely awful,” even though he had asked others about it before enrolling.

Clearly, he thought, there was a need for more input. So Lanning and Dahms created “Polyratings,” where about 400 of Cal Poly’s 1,000 full-time faculty have thus far been anonymously critiqued, often rather colorfully.

Consider these assessments:

“Flaming idiot.”

“She is hot.”

“Awesome.”

“I would not recommend this DINOSAUR of a professor.”

“Why did Barnum & Bailey overlooked [sic] his one?”

There are tips about what to expect:

“She . . . will most likely bring up her daughter or her time spent at UCLA at least once a lecture.”

“Lectures were very unclear. . . . But if you like to drink beer at Spikes, he will go with you.”

“Not a bad class for an early morning nap.”

“He brought us homemade brownies and some other good stuff at our final.”

“She magically transformed into a dog in the middle of a lecture.”

The evaluations are by no means all like that. A number are straightforward reviews of teaching skills, tests and homework loads, often favorable.

Indeed, Lanning, who has edited out some particularly outrageous remarks, said that for the most part the reviews were mature and constructive.

He doubts that the site will change anybody’s teaching technique and sees its main value as a student guide.

Faculty reaction has been mixed. Some professors are offended. Some like it and many apparently haven’t looked at it.

But even those who believe that students have every right to publicly grade their instructors have raised the issue that is the curse and blessing of so much of the Net: Anybody can say anything.

How do you know the people filing the evaluations even took the course? How do you know some spiteful student isn’tfiling multiple bad reviews? How do you know an instructor isn’t filing multiple favorable reviews of himself?

Those questions have revived interest in making public some sort of university-sanctioned evaluations.

Jerry Hanley, Cal Poly’s chief information officer, said he told the faculty senate, “This is a part of life. It’s gonna happen.”

He is now looking into ways that Cal Poly might put evaluations online, drawing from the in-class critiques as well as other information from students. Safeguards would be used to keep out bogus reviews.

Although Lanning said he received some administration e-mails about inappropriate use of the campus computer system, Hanley said they were sent by lower-level managers and do not reflect his views.

“Nobody who works for me felt this was an inappropriate use,” Hanley said.

The freedom of the Net unleashed comments a little shocking for some.

“They don’t sound like me and I sort of am puzzled by them and a little bit bothered,” said math professor Robert Wolf, who got mixed reviews, including a few biting ones.

George Lewis, the math professor who was called a dinosaur, has--appropriately enough for a dinosaur--a thick skin about it. He says he and friends have paged through the site for entertainment.

“They can take all the shots at me they want. Anybody who sits through 10 weeks of calculus with me is entitled.”

Anyway, he added, “I like dinosaurs. I want to be a brontosaurus. They’re very friendly and cuddly.”