Inside Higher Ed: RateMyRankings: Ridiculous! 

Patricia McGuire, President of Trinity Washington University,  recently wrote an insightful article entitled RateMyRankings: Ridicuous! in Inside Higher Ed.  My favorite quote from the article: 

"Pretending to measure instructional quality, Forbes uses the profoundly scurrilous RateMyProfessors.com for 25 percent of its scoring method. Why stop there? Why not add a category for the number of campus sluts outed on JuicyCampus.com? RateMyProfessors invites just as much vicious gossip and cruel slander while providing no legitimate assessment of excellence in teaching (except for those who think that ratings of “Easy” or “Hard” or “Hot” or “Not” are good ways to judge the quality of collegiate instruction!)." 

The great irony here is that while "critical thinking" is often promoted as an increasingly important aspect of "modern" education, the most popular sources of rankings for educational programs demonstrate no critical thinking whatsoever.   

On a different, though somewhat related topic, I should add that I completely share Arturo Portnoy's view of actual student course evaluations, expressed in his article, A Crisis in Higher Education: Student Evaluations and Failing Standards.  It's not that I object to student course evaluations. In fact, I would always make use of them to solicit student feedback.  But I would never use them to measure teaching effectiveness.  They're useless in that regard. Even worse, when used to measure teaching effectiveness, they're damaging to the educational process.