Belled Cats & Paper Tigers

I was reading the latest variation of the article about how grade inflation is a travesty that will eventually destroy our educational system (courtesy of the New York Times online this time around) and reflecting that efforts to regulate the behavior of people in jobs from which they can never be fired is even sillier than the belief that media outrage (or even public outrage) can influence the actions of the CEOs of privately-owned companies, when I ran across a link to one of those “rate my instructor” sites we keep hearing about. At this point in history I’ve had somewhere between 100 and 200 students at MSU, and some of them have apparently had quite strong feelings about me (good and bad, thank you), if my teacher evaluations are anything to go by, so I decided to look myself up on the rankings. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I wasn’t listed. Neither were any of our full, associate or assistant professors, or any of our professors of the practice. In fact, there were only two listings for the entire Management Department: a graduate student who dropped out of the program nearly a decade ago, and a member of my own cohort – who did not have a single rating…

Puzzled by this, I did a quick Internet search and looked myself up on a few of the competing sites. Still no listing for me – or for any of our faculty, in fact. There were a few listings for other departments in the business school, but none of them were names I knew – and I should tell you that there are a number of quite prominent people working in this institution. That none of them should be ranked anywhere online seemed extremely odd to me, until I realized that I for the most part these are not free services – you have to pay to get to any of the really good parts of any of them, and no college student is going to do any such thing. Even if they were willing to spend the money – and most people in that age group are much more interested in buying beer and/or pizza – the rating system would have no real legitimacy with the audience. Which is to say, there would be nothing to keep a low-ranking instructor (or a graduate student) from logging in and reading what his or her students had to say about him or her – or worse yet, making several bogus rankings to make him or herself look better…

There’s also no reason to believe that the people who own the site would have any interest in maintaining the confidentiality of the people posting, especially if they were members who have already entered their personal contact information (and credit card numbers) into the system. I doubt any graduate student would really care, and it’s a certainty no tenured professor ever would, but junior faculty who are trying to qualify for tenure in schools where your teacher evaluations are weighted in that decision might – and there’d be no way to be sure that some psychotic bastard wouldn’t try to take revenge for a bad rating or two that cost him or her a job. Even without a fish-eyed admiral from the “Star Wars” movies yelling “It’s a Trap!” to warn them there’s no way any undergraduate with the sense God gave a gerbil would ever risk being ratted out by such a concern…

I can’t say for certain, of course, but I imagine that there are sources on campus – or somewhere very nearby – where a wide variety of intelligence regarding courses to avoid and instructors to stay away from is available to all of our students; certainly there was in my day, and with social networking available it’s probably too easy these days. I’m not saying there’s a Facebook group called “Max P. Belin DIE DIE DIE!!!” out there, but I must admit that I’d be completely unsurprised if there was – and rather astonished if at least some of our more hard-assed instructors HADN’T been so honored…

And I’d be completely floored if anyone in this institution believed for even one moment that there was anything they could do about it…