Dembski has posted a "UD exclusive" (like the Worldnutdaily, "exclusive" here means "we're the only ones who will publish this crap") by Jerry Bergman, certified creationist loon, attacking Steve Rissing, a biology professor from Ohio State and one of the founders of Ohio Citizens for Science (thus, in the interests of full disclosure, he is a colleague of mine and quite a nice guy as well). Part of that attack involved the Bryan Leonard situation, which has been written about by many others. I want to focus on one amusing part of the attack: student ratings. Half of Bergman's "exclusive" involves student ratings.
Bergman goes to ratemyprofessors.com and gets the ratings for Rissing, using them to build his case against him. Now, I would think by now that everyone would know how completely pointless such ratings are. There is an obvious sample bias in any such undertaking, as those who don't like someone are far more likely to bother rating a professor than someone who does. And no one really takes them seriously. For crying out loud, there is actually a rating scale for "hotness" and one of Rissing's students talks about how sultry he is (having met him, I'm not sure I can agree with that).
Nonetheless, Bergman trudges ahead with, and Dembski dutifully posts, this silly attack on Rissing, pointing out that on a scale of 1 to 5, his overall rating was a 1.9. And he quotes a series of statements from his students about how the class is easy and he rambles a lot and so forth. So why not, just for fun, have a look at how Dembski and Bergman's students rate them.
Here's Bergman's student ratings. There are only 3 of them, two of whom rate him as "poor quality" and the third says the class was an "easy A", so he rated him high.
And here are Dembski's student ratings. There are three of them as well, but the latest one (from today) is obviously a joke (and a fairly funny one, allegedly from DaveScot - "SHUT UP I LOVE HIM. YOU'RE OUTTA HERE - DS"). Of the other two, one proclaims him dull and the other is rather more expressive:
What a vacuous tool! He is SO full of himself. He is actually full of **** and that's it. You could NOT design a worse professor.
And this, folks, is from a Baptist seminary student. Dembski rated a whopping 1.0 overall. Now, before someone answers that there are only a few for Dembski but over 50 for Rissing, bear in mind that Dembski probably had less than 100 students in the short time he was at SBTS, unlikely much more than that, while Rissing would have had something in the range of 2000 or more students in the several years covered by the ratings. The percentages are comparable.
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I also like that it's from Bergman, who holds a mail order Ph.D. from Columbia Pacific University.
Bergman also neglected to mention a few other things. For example, the main complaint of the three members of the graduate faculty of Ohio State was that the composition of Leonard's dissertation committee failed to meet the requirements of the graduate school. Further, Leonard's dissertation defence was postponed at the request of his advisor just as a properly constituted committee was being formed. The graduate school did not cancel Leonard's defense; it merely insisted that the University's requirements for the awarding of degrees be adhered to. It was Leonard and his supervisor who elected to cancel the defense given the prospect of facing a properly constituted committee rather than a rigged committee. As I wrote on Panda's Thumb, creationists only want to work in front of a fixed jury.
I'm glad you mentioned ratemyprofessor.com, because, 18 years after the fact, I finally got to exact token revenge on a racist, man-hating sociology professor who screwed me out of an A (and hence a 4.0 for that semester). Man, some of the comments on that site are great. I wish I'd known at age 18 to go to the provost or even all the way to the dean to argue on my own behalf. I'm actually mortified that the professor in question is still in the same department, surely tenured at this point and racking up young enemies faster than Casey Luskin can shoot chunks of bullshit out of his mouth. Whew!
It's probably not from the real DaveScot. Over at AtBC, it's pretty commonplace to make up fake Davetard lines playing with the tail of your comment.
Why don't you go play with the tail of your boyfriend, homo. You're Audi 5000. -dt
No, it's not from the real DaveScot. For that matter, the other two ratings may well be fake too, for all we know (especially since it lists Dembski as a finance professor). But that's exactly the point about that website - you have no idea if the ratings mean anything. The bad reviews could be, and probably often are, nothing more than a disgruntled student who failed a test trying to get back at a professor. To use those ratings as a genuine test of whether someone is a good professor is absurd.
Ooohh - that Davescot one might have been me. I see it's been deleated now, though.
No one mocks the overlord -ds
RateMyProfessor is a wonderfully inane resource. I look at it once a quarter, mostly for kicks (and of course to see which of my professors are the hottest), and on one instance, several students' biggest complaint about one professor was that he gave quizzes every friday, preventing them from getting drunk every thursday night. Ah, college.
So Dembski can't make up enough lies on his own, he has to endorse the lies of other idiots?
You can't tell by looking at them?
I see You've been deleated now, though! -dt
I know - suprised they didn't delete the others too. How did they knwo it was bogus? Do they have some sort of explanitory filter, or something?
I've misplaced my sense of humour - ds
"knwo"?
"explanitory"?
"humour"??
You are out of here you crazy misspelling Canuck! - ds
ratemyprofessors.com is a joke. It is run in part by a neocon law student, which tells you how interested they are in 'fairness.' I asked about a negative rating that I received there after I had gotten into an argument with a creationist at KCFS, whom I suspected left the rating, wondering if there were a way to verify whether or not a rater was actually a student. I was informed that there was no way to do that and they had no intention of implementing any such system. Their rationale? It might 'scare off' raters. So, non-students can rate anyone they want to.
Nice.