Rate Your Professor: A New Academic Ranking

AcademicJobs.com has launched "Rate Your Professor", a platform enabling students to provide feedback on their professors. The goal is to recognise excellent teaching and improve the academic experience. This initiative aims to create a student-centred university ranking system, complementing existing rankings that primarily focus on research. By gathering student feedback, the platform seeks to better understand and measure student engagement, learning, and outcomes. Ultimately, this data will assist prospective students in making informed choices about their higher education.

1. Recognition and Appreciation of Teaching Excellence:

• The platform's primary objective is to acknowledge and celebrate professors who have a positive impact on student learning. The founder emphasises the importance of giving "accolades to those professors who help us learn and shine."
• This suggests a move away from simply measuring research output to valuing the quality of teaching and student-professor interactions.

1. Student Reflection and Gratitude:

• The platform encourages students to actively reflect on the impact professors have had on their lives.
• The founder explicitly links this activity to the positive feeling of expressing gratitude, highlighting a perceived "win win for all" approach to the rating system. "Research shows that when we express gratitude, we feel good for doing it, and that is a win win for all."

1. Development of Student-Centric Data and Rankings:

• A significant goal is to collect data on "student engagement," "student learnings," and "student outcomes." This data is intended to shift the focus of university rankings from metrics like research citations and institutional reputation (traditionally rated by "stuffy old academics") to areas more relevant to the student experience.
• The platform is explicitly designed to challenge current ranking methodologies: "You see all university and academic rankings out there focus largely on research output and citations, as well as global impact and institutional reputation rated by stuffy old academics. This ranking serves very few students."
• The aim is to develop an "academic ranking and profile that assists future students and their families".
• Student Empowerment and Influence:The platform seeks to give students, both past and present, a voice in evaluating the quality of teaching within universities.
• The use of student feedback is presented as crucial to the creation of the student-centric ranking system and will form the base data for the entire system.
• By encouraging students to "rate your professors," the platform aims to empower them to directly influence the future of higher education.

1. Improving Higher Education:

• The ultimate goal, as the founder sees it, is to improve the higher education system as a whole. The closing line of the text: "So when you rate your professors, you and helping you, them and the future of higher education and learning," suggests this idea.

Important Facts and Points:

• The platform is hosted on academicjobs.com.
• The founder's motivations are: recognition for excellent professors, student reflection and data collection focused on student engagement and outcomes.
• The platform is designed to provide data for a new type of university ranking - one that is meaningful to the undergraduate student.
• Student feedback is the primary mechanism for rating and data collection.
• The platform aims to benefit students, professors and improve the future of higher education.

Further Considerations:

• The specific mechanisms for data collection and analysis will need to be understood to assess the reliability and validity of the rankings produced.
• The platform's long-term impact on higher education institutions will depend on how it's adopted and how the data is used.
• The possibility of bias and/or gaming the system by students needs to be considered as well.

Rate Your Professor today at www.AcademicJobs.com