At around this time last year, I can still remember picking up a fresh copy of Ultra Vires from the usual spot near Bora’s Head. Of course, this type of issue (so I am told) always generates a little more buzz because it had a ranking of marks – professors’ marks.
Based on student feedback from course evaluation results, UV has traditionally published a “professor rankings”, which gives professors both a “score” and a numbered ranking.
As a student of economics (the purest and most beautiful of all the social sciences), I am normally head-over-heels for any proposal that gives customers — in this case, law students —more information on which they can make future decisions. However, this information is so convoluted and vague so as to be meaningless; it does not result in better student decision-making or better teaching, and is deeply offensive to professors.
The first thing you should know about these rankings are that they only gauge one student response: what bubble they filled in on a Scantron card when asked to evaluate their professor.
The results of this single question are hopelessly vague and do not capture nuances such as: quality as a lecturer; likeability or friendliness to students; the helpfulness of office hours; how well lectures prepared students for the final; course reader quality; dryness of the readings; and the difficulty of the final.
Current Rankings are “Unused or Used Poorly”
First, I am inclined to say based on the experiences of my peers that no one actually uses the ranking to select which classes they take in upper-years. Students will take a class based on a combination of prerequisite necessity, interest, timetable calculus, (ease of) workload, or the Divine Providence of the Waitlist God (Behold! He is a vengeful and merciless Deity!)
Second, even if students do factor the professor into their course selection strategy, they will not do so on the basis of UV list rankings. They will probably ask an upper-year who has taken the class before, so that they can get a much more nuanced and clear picture of that professor.
Third, even if there are some students who do use the UV rankings as a factor in course selection, then it is still a good idea to get rid of the rankings. Basing what classes you will take based on a vague, meaningless score is a monumentally foolish idea, and so shielding this information from the public is the kind of paternalism I can really get behind. If the rankings will be unused or used poorly, then why not get rid of them and do everyone some good?
Won’t Someone Think of the Professors?
What about the positive feedback that these rankings give to professors?
Professors already have access to the full course evaluations, with answers to much more focused questions about class workload, student engagement, and difficulty of the material. Publishing the most un-nuanced question in UV does not give faculty any additional insights into how to improve classes.
Faculty are smart enough to know that these rankings are hollow, and are also motivated to be what they think a good professor is. While students may prioritize class engagement, a professor may think that covering more material is preferable, and would likely be keenly aware of the trade-off between the two aims.
Ranking our faculty members is deeply offensive. It invariably means we tell some of our professors that they are “below-average” in terms of how students feel about them.
Some professors have the benefit of teaching interesting material in small group classes. Others have to feel the scorn of 1Ls filling in Scantrons after they have had a dry administrative law lecture.
The current UV rankings that number our professors based on a single, arbitrary, and unhelpful dataset is good for neither students nor professors. While public information that is based on the full course evaluations could be useful for students, the current system – of both scoring professors on a pointless question and then public ranking them – needs to go.
