Raymond, I agree that the current system of anonymous feedback is not ideal. But it’s the best that is available. If they create something better then I’m sure that the interest in anonymous feedback will dramatically decrease.

David, the fact that some students will give unfair assessment of teachers is no reason to deny all students a voice. An analogy is the fact that criminals will often falsely complain about treatment by police. Should we consider that everyone who complains about police action is a criminal and disregard their complaints?

Here is a humorous look at the problem: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?%20id=6fnxs4gx7j6qr4v7qn567y5hb52ywb33

Finally, with regard to high school students, it’s worth pointing out that there are teachers leaving the WA private and public education systems because of incidents with student discipline where student rights are placed above all else. There is very little advocacy for teachers in the system these days, and a reliance on student ratings pushes dangerously further in that direction.

I think it’s a good idea to have student feedback because people learn better from teachers they like, at least I know I did. However this should be taken with a grain of salt because an *anonymous* student could put in several postings about how much they hate a teacher. Doing that over a period of time it can easily look like several classes.

Should a single student make a whole school look bad because they don’t want to be educated? I think students’ opinions are good but need to be weighted accordingly.

Also, that article from Mentone doesn’t tell you whether it’s more to do with the teachers, the student or the parents. If this student didn’t want to learn and was hiding it from the father it could come out this way very easily.

At first glance, this sounds great.

But there’s one problem with this suggestion:

In real life, a metric is almost never able to cover everything, and people tend to work on improving the metric, no matter whether it makes sense within the greater picture.

So if the wages or even the job of a teacher depend on the metric “rated good by students” what will be the effects?

There are problems like students rating teachers giving good marks better that might result in all teachers giving all students relatively good marks and leeting no student ever fall any exam.

That in turn might result in students doing less work because they anyway get good marks and never fall at any exam, resulting in a lower overall education level.

I’m not saying rating of teachers generally was a bad thing, but as soon as there are formal or informal consequences of bad ratings, you must consider both the possible positive and the possible negative effects of these ratings.

The ratemyteacher.com site is about high-schools, and there is more need for feedback in that area. University students know their rights and are able to persue civil or criminal cases against professors who treat them badly. High-school students have little ability to defend themselves and now at the first time that they get an opportunity to air their grievances the teachers want to tromp on their rights.

I take your comments as support for my points.