Rate Your Professor: A New Academic Ranking
AcademicJobs.com has launched "Rate Your Professor", a platform allowing students to review their professors. Its aim is to recognise excellent teaching and provide data-driven insights into effective instruction, shifting the focus from research output to student experience. This initiative seeks to create a more student-centric university ranking system, benefiting both current and prospective students. The platform's creator believes expressing gratitude through reviews benefits both students and professors, and ultimately improves higher education.
- Student-Centric Evaluation of Professors: The primary theme of this initiative is a shift towards a student-focused evaluation of academic staff. This contrasts with traditional ranking systems that primarily prioritise research output and institutional reputation. As Kanizay states, "This ranking serves very few students. We are interested in developing a university and college ranking that is meaningful to the undergrad student...".
- Recognition of Teaching Excellence: The platform aims to acknowledge and celebrate professors who excel at teaching and student engagement. The "Rate Your Professor" feature is intended to "give accolades to those professors who help us learn and shine." This suggests a desire to highlight the positive impact of teaching staff on their students.
- Student Reflection and Gratitude: The initiative promotes the idea of student reflection on their academic experiences and the professors who have influenced them. Kanizay believes that by providing feedback students will engage in a process of reflection. He argues that "Research shows that when we express gratitude, we feel good for doing it, and that is a win win for all."
- Data-Driven Insights into Student Experience: A key objective is to collect student feedback in order to generate meaningful data about the student experience. The platform is geared towards "...developing data that helps us understand which professors and institutions assist their students the most." This suggests the initiative is designed to inform future students and families, as well as to hold higher education institutions to account in terms of their student support.
- Development of a Student-Focused Ranking System: A significant element of the initiative is the ambition to create a ranking system based on student engagement, learning, and outcomes. Traditional university rankings are criticised for focusing on "research output and citations, as well as global impact and institutional reputation rated by stuffy old academics." The new system aims to be more relevant and beneficial to prospective undergraduate students by measuring parameters such as 'student engagement', ' student learnings' and 'student outcomes'.
- Community Benefit Through Feedback: The platform promotes the idea that by providing feedback, students not only help themselves, but also the professors and the future of higher education and learning.
The "Rate Your Professor" platform aims to have the following impacts:
- Empower Students: By giving students a voice in evaluating their educators and institutions.
- Highlight Excellence: By providing public recognition for outstanding teaching staff.
- Inform Decisions: By providing prospective students and their families with student-centric data to make more informed choices about higher education institutions.
The "Rate Your Professor" initiative is presented as a transformative tool that aims to give greater agency to students in the evaluation of higher education. By capturing student feedback, the platform intends to develop a more student-focused method of assessment and ranking, which would ideally provide useful insights for both existing and future students and encourage institutions to improve their learning environments. The initiative’s creator, Jarrod Kanizay, positions it as a win-win for all.
Rate Your Professor today at www.AcademicJobs.com
