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The Wisdom of Crowds of Frat Boys, Redux

By drorzel on June 5, 2007.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of RateMyProfessors showing that the ratings correlate well with "official" evaluations:

What if RateMyProfessors.com -- the site that professors love to hate -- is more accurate than they think? Or what if officially sanctioned student evaluations of faculty members -- which many professors like to contrast with RateMyProfessors.com -- are just as dubious as RateMyProfessors?

Those are questions raised by a new study by two professors at the University of Maine who compared the ratings on RateMyProfessors.com of 426 Maine instructors with the formal student evaluations used by the university. The results were just published in the journal Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation. The key findings are that RateMyProfessors.com ratings have a significant correlation with the formal student evaluations on the questions about the overall quality of the course and the relative difficulty or ease of the course.

Looks like The Dean Dad was on to something...

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Academia

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But doesn't that assume that the student rankings done by the university are worthwhile to begin with??

RPM,

The paper for the study refers to a pretty substantial body of research that indicates that the formal student evaluations *are* worthwhile.