@P – damn straight.

end of discussion.

Actually, I do. Even the boring ones. But that’s beside the point – of course you’re right; it’s not the best picture. I’ve also filled out a course evaluation for every professor, though, and before the Registrar changed the rules and insisted that the professor remain in the room, I know that people often compared answers and often had no idea how to respond to certain questions. The student effort required at ratemyprofessors is much less than that required to fill out a course evaluation that is actually thoughtful (especially considering how bad some of the questions are), and you can do it on your own time.

I don’t like the site much (pretty sure certain people rate themselves), but until Georgetown starts making a) comments on professors and b) the spread of numbers (in other words, how many 5s, how many 4s) available, course evaluation results are not all that useful. I direct you again to Johns Hopkins – now, those are useful course evaluations: they ask better questions and make more specifics about the answers available to the community, often including comments (and btw, the spring semester of 2010 already has evaluations up – here’s the site: http://www.jhu.edu/~merlin/as/Results.html). At Georgetown, nobody sees the comments on the backs of the evaluations except the professor being evaluated – not even the chairs of the various departments, according to one I spoke to last semester. The only really useful thing on the course evaluations site is that it tells you how many papers the prof assigned and whether there was a final.

Just in case anyone from the Registrar is reading this, as bad as the evaluations are, it would be nice to have evaluations from 2008 and 2009 also available. It would be even nicer if the results were presented in a manner that is easier to read.

Also, Eileen, Ratemyprofessor is biased because most people don’t go on ratemyprofessor unless they have a strong opinion of a certain professor. Do you go on and rate every professor you’ve ever had? If more people did it, the average professor would have far more ratings. It’s more useful to look at the course evals and then look at comments on ratemyprofessor.