Ryan ChartrandOne candidate makes sense, but appears to be hated by everyone else. An alternative choice would require personal compromises, but is well liked by peers. The other option is a mystery – intriguing, yet far too polarizing by most accounts.
Like a renegade, underground voter information guide, Polyratings.com lives on, purporting to help the electorate of a student body make informed decisions when selecting instructors.
The Web site, technically Polyratings 2, through which Cal Poly students can publish critiques and praises of their professors, now features more accommodating search features while allowing students to add professors to the database.
“I live by it,” microbiology junior Julie Anderson said.
A student-run endeavor created by Cal Poly students Doug Dahms and Forrest Lanning (not affiliated with Cal Poly administration or Associated Students Inc.), Polyratings was activated Jan. 9, 1999 and launched as the updated, second incarnation by Cal Poly student J. Paul Reed on Aug. 19, 2001.
While Cal Poly students may peruse every word before registration, professors themselves don’t seem to pay it much mind.
“I don’t check it,” said Matt Carlton, a statistics professor at Cal Poly for nine years. “It’s a combination of two reasons. First, from a statistician’s point of view, the sample is totally biased and not close to representative of what students think. Secondly, it’s too tempting to look at others’ ratings, and that’s not an appropriate thing to do with a terribly biased sample of opinions.”
The assessments, Carlton said, are akin to feedback given to politicians because those sounding off usually do so from an extreme, while a silent majority remains unheard.
“The same thing happens in politics, when politicians hear from constituents on polarized sides,” he said. “Polyratings is really the same phenomenon – it’s either a rave or a rant. It doesn’t give any sense of how the majority of students feel.”
As of Wednesday, the most ratings a professor received was 180, amounting to less than one percent of the school’s fall 2007 enrollment of 19,777.
Adding to the insignificance of the ratings, said English professor Robert Inchausti, are the official evaluations administered by the school toward the end of each quarter.
“I think the faculty view on Polyratings is that the people commenting usually really like a class or really hate a class – what you’re going to get are extremes,” he said. “Official evaluations are more measured and not as extreme.”
Pamalee Brady, an architectural engineering professor at Cal Poly for 10 years, agrees that the small number of commenting students doesn’t sufficiently depict the entire student body’s experience.
“If a professor’s been here a really long time and there are only about 100 posts, it’s not really representative,” she said. “Students should think critically and not take it at face value.”
Of the 1,565 professors filed in the database, averaging almost 20 evaluations apiece, some seemed to have more personal reasons for disregarding the site.
Although Carlton couldn’t recall a case of negative evaluations hindering an instructor’s in-class performance, he did mention a recent situation where a scathing critique was “very upsetting” to a colleague, affecting her on a personal level.
“She was certainly shaken up by the experience,” he said.
Sometimes, the overwhelming censure is enough to entirely dissuade instructors from monitoring their ratings, materials engineering professor Trevor Harding said.
“I think most faculty don’t look often because it can be so depressing,” he said.
Even those who admitted to occasionally checking the site purely out of curiosity minimized its importance.
“Occasionally I will look, from time to time, when someone will tell me interesting things on it and I’ll check it out,” Inchausti said. “It varies. There are people who never look at it, and others all the time – to them it’s a fascination.”
Some may take it upon themselves to take a look if they hear about comments that necessitate it, psychology professor Chuck Slem said.
“In general we don’t look at it,” he said. “But someone may check if there’s something outrageous, or some slanderous things they may want to take care of.”
His department doesn’t appear to be the only one to have an unspoken understanding of shunning the site.
“Most of the people in my hall steer clear of it,” Carlton said.
No study has gauged professors’ perceptions or responses to the site, according to Jean DeCosta, dean of students.
“My opinion is that students can do a disservice to themselves if they put too much stock in comments that can be so disrespectful and biased,” DeCosta said.
She said the only times she becomes privy to comments on the site are when professors become distressed due to allegedly inappropriate comments, at which point they are advised to contact the site’s administrators to have the comments removed.
That can be easier said than done, according to Slem.
“One of the biggest problems is when a disgruntled student will say something false,” he said. “As a professor it’s very hard to get it taken off.”
Reed, who graduated in 2003, told the Mustang Daily in October 2006 that he no longer had the time to maintain the site, as more than 200 then-new professors who had been submitted needed to be filtered into the database.
Vice provost of Academic Affairs David Conn, who called the site’s freewheeling approach “very unscientific” and “totally haphazard,” analogized the asserted lack of veracity within the comments to the same danger found everywhere online.
“Not to say there isn’t some useful information on it, but a lot of times people may not know what they’re looking at,” Conn said. “It’s a little bit like using the Internet in general – you may know very little about something’s reliability and validity.”
Despite its criticisms, students still figure to frequent the site.
“I always check it out when I register to see what professors are like,” English sophomore Stacy Liu said. “I’ve found it pretty useful.”
Instrumental in Polyratings’ appeal is its particularized nature exclusive to Cal Poly, Anderson said.
“I like it because it’s not just four stars,” she added, alluding to nationally oriented sites such as Ratemyprofessors.com providing less opportunity to reason a grade. “You have an opportunity to explain yourself and justify the ratings with words – and it’s set up for Cal Poly, not like other sites that are set up for any university.”
However, what other sites may lack in locality, they make up for it with more constructive, quantifiable, specific information, Brady said. Sites such as Pickaprof.com, which is affiliated with Facebook, offer students detailed data on teachers’ grading habits.
Anderson, who clarified Polyratings should be “taken with a grain of salt,” indicated that its reputation as a helpful resource doesn’t seem to be on the verge of dissipating any time soon.
“In one of my classes there are a lot of freshmen, and everyone seems to know about it,” she said.
Most professors and administrators urge students to exercise healthy skepticism when considering the site’s offerings, consult known and trusted friends and peers when registering, value learning over grades, make more thorough use of official evaluations and remember what one student may dislike about a professor’s teaching style may be liked by others.
In spite of their grievances, most faculty and administrators credit the site for its noble ideals and inherent exercise of democracy, albeit one they say is overly rough around the edges.
“Professors may have misgivings about themselves being up on Polyratings,” said Slem, who reminisced about his days as an undergraduate student at UCLA, where a Polyratings of its day covertly resided in the bookstore as a booklet containing students’ reviews of teachers. “But I’m sure they wouldn’t mind having student ratings to know who they’re getting in class.”