Giving Professors Grades Online

Jaysen Gillespie wants to turn things around on professors. We all know that professors grade students. He wants students to evaluate professors, and not just in quiet conversations or on private report cards.

Gillespie’s Irvine-based Studentinfo.org (https://www.studentinfo.org) takes student opinions public by posting their critiques of professors and other college instructors on the Internet. The company has collected about 600 critiques of professors at UC Irvine and 100 from Santa Ana College, the two schools it has concentrated on, but it is pushing into UCLA and Occidental College.

Studentinfo.org is just one of several companies across the country that have gone online in the last few months to offer independent evaluations of professors.

The critiques can be biting. One review in Ratingsonline.com called a San Diego State professor “a JERK. If you are enrolled in his class get out. . . . He treats students like second class citizens. STAY AWAY FROM THIS INSTRUCTOR!!!”

Others are more reasoned. A Studentinfo.org review of UC Irvine sociology professor Bernard McGrane says: “If you haven’t taken a McGrane course, do it. The work isn’t too outrageous, and the knowledge learned about one’s self is outstanding.” After hearing his critique, McGrane said: “I think in terms of students’ expressing their evaluations of their professors, that whole thing is fine. It’s like the customers know best.”

Student critiques are nothing new, but seldom have they been made so public. Students at many schools complete evaluations, but they are often for the use of the administration, and the information released to students is limited. At UC Irvine, said William Schoenfeld, dean of the School of Social Sciences, the evaluation process differs within the university from school to school and even department to department. Some information--but not students’ comments--is shared with a free publication by the student government that rates professors.

Things are just as hit or miss at UCLA. “Some departments publish them, others don’t release them,” said Harlan Lebo, director of communications for the College of Letters of Sciences.

Other schools may have critiques on paper that students can view in an office.

Schoenfeld sees advantages in online evaluations for students and faculty. “Here students can feel they’re 1,000% anonymous. For individual faculty members it provides the advantage that you can look at spontaneous comments and perhaps get some insight. You might learn something without having to be defensive.”

But not all professors have the same attitude. A heavily criticized English professor at City College of San Francisco has sued the former student who set up an evaluation site on the World Wide Web, calling it “a hate site.”

Daniel Curson-Brown said the anonymity afforded to students on the online sites creates “extortion of grades. You can’t grade honestly because someone can go after you.”

The suit does not specify an amount of damages and no trial date has been set.

American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Bernard Burke, who is representing Web master Ryan Lathouwers, said Curson-Brown doesn’t have a case. “People used vivid and colorful language to describe their distaste for his teaching style,” Burke said. “That’s subjective. The only things they can’t say are false statements of fact.”

Schoenfeld has concerns that anyone--even his mother trying to pump up her son’s reputation--can send in a review of his classes.

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Gillespie and Web masters at other sites agreed that the system is not foolproof and that someone who wants to spend time writing false reviews could do so. But they hope there are enough safeguards to keep fraud to a minimum. Among safeguards are confirmations sent to the critics’ e-mail addresses and requests for assurances that critics are students.

Dillon Green, co-founder of a site called teacherreviews.com in Virginia, said he started it “because I had a really awesome professor and I wanted people to know about him.” It is the most ambitious such site, with 3,600 reviews.

Green said he gets as many e-mails from professors as from students. “We found a lot of professors like the site because they get honest opinions about how they’re doing,” he said.

Gillespie, 26, started wondering about evaluations during his junior year at Duke University. “I was thinking, ‘There’s got to be a better way of getting information about a professor than hunting down a friend who had had them,’ ” he said.

After attending graduate school at Stanford, he worked for a Culver City special-effects company but quit to form a Web-based market research company, Redpen.com. Because the company’s target demographic is students, he moved to Irvine, and UC Irvine became the natural place to concentrate his efforts when he started building Studentinfo.org last June out of his apartment.

The Web site went online in September, and Gillespie made presentations to student organizations to encourage their participation. To get a password to the site, students must contribute two reviews, but they don’t have to prove they’re students. The goal is to have critiques of every school in the Southland.

He said he doesn’t think his site can make much money just by evaluating professors, but he envisions its turning into an advertising-supported site that could rate apartments near campus and other aspects of student life.

“We’re taking a process usually designed for the benefit of professors and the administration and trying to use it for the benefit of the students,” he said. “The professors that won’t like it are not very good. That’s almost so obvious that it’s not worth saying.”