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October 07, 2003
Rating Teachers
From yesterday's Washington Post: Students Fill Grade Book On Teachers at Web Site. The article is about Ratemyteachers.com, another site that allows students to review teachers from their school:
Critics, including many teachers and principals, said the site's ratings are unscientific, not to mention hurtful. Many school districts across the country, including Montgomery County and Loudoun County, have blocked access to ratemyteachers.com from school computers.
I think that there's a great potential for this kind of service to provide students, parents, and administrators with valuable (if unscientific) feedback. However, it's accompanied by a great potential for immature abuse.
It strikes me that what's lacking from this kind of service is a social software-like reputation system like Slashdot uses. E.g., the community needs to be able to mod up or down the comments. Of course, the hole in that approach is likely that the small sample size may not be large enough to effectively moderate itself.
Posted October 7, 2003 06:10 PM