Give your professors a break
When using rating websites to pick your professor, we often hear the phrase “don’t read the comments” or use them as a guidepost to make the final decision. What we should say is “don’t leave the negative comments to begin with.”
The Internet allows us to hide behind a screen, instantly sending negative messages to people, including hurtful comments about our professors.
RateMyProfessors.com provides students with the ability to anonymously critique their professors. Most of these critiques, however, are more destructive rather than constructive.
“I think that a more helpful thing is something where you actually put your name,” journalism professor Teresa Hernandez said. “I think one of the things that’s happened in our society is we’ve become people that are angry and upset with things but we do it without standing behind what we say.”
Hernandez added that the comments left on the website go beyond being simply critical – they can be scathing.
It’s true; many of the comments on RateMyProfessors.com are insulting and they provide almost no useful feedback. Imagine if people went online and ranked you, throwing around angry adjectives and attempting to convince other people that you’re not good at what you love. People often think that professors should just have thicker skin, but negative comments can still hurt no matter how strong a person is.
“I think for professors that look at RateMyProfessors.com, it certainly does impact their confidence and can create some element of insecurity or concern about how they’re doing, but most professors understand the biases,” Honors Program Director Phame Camarena said.
Part of the problem stems from our education system and the pressure we feel to succeed. Many students obsess over their grades and their GPAs, and can then feel angry or disappointed when they don’t get the grades they want. This can lead them to take that anger to the anonymity of the Internet.
“I gave [my students] an assignment to do a creative project and one of the criteria was ‘are you being kind to yourself?’ and someone asked me what that meant,” Hernandez said. “Later, I thought, ‘Wait, they really don’t know what it’s like to not beat themselves up constantly because that’s kind of the world we live in’ and that’s unfortunate, really.”
Obviously, we’re not going to love every professor we have. We’re not going to learn something life changing from every class. But professors are human. And if we’re struggling in a class or not understanding a professor, posting rude comments online is definitely not the way to address the problem.
“What I’m hoping for is that we’re kind of overthrowing that culture (where students think they) shouldn’t be engaged in a conversation with a professor or correct a professor if they have something misspelled; we’re just human beings,” Hernandez said.
Going online and saying that a professor is the “worst professor ever” will not make the student or the professor learn anything; it won’t make anyone grow or improve.
It won’t help other students learn anything useful about that professor – it will simply hurt someone.
