Professor Feedback
Below are comments we've received from members of the UCLA faculty. These submissions have been published with the consent of the authors. If you are a UCLA professor and would like to tell us what you think, click here to send us feedback.
"I've found the student evaluations very informative. As an environmentaleconomist, this whole process seems to me to be a lot like the CommunityRight-to-Know Act, the Toxics Release Inventory, and Proposition 65 inCalifornia. The idea is that information about what pollutants firms areemitting, or what toxic ingredients are contained in products, will leadconsumers to adjust their demands for products in a way that creates amarket (profit) incentive for firms to do the right thing. Now if we couldjust figure out how to compensate professors in a way that actuallyreflects their teaching.... It's too bad we don't get paid more ifstudents actually want to take our classes. But this is a step in theright direction. Good for you."
UCLA Department of Economics
"As a professor here (by and large a positively-rated one) I find thiswebsite to be highly problematic.
To grasp the problem, imagine if there were a site calledUCLAstudents.com on which TAs and professors could post comments abouteach student, anonymously and with no chance for response. Every timethat a student did something that offended somebody or bothered them insome way teachers could, under cover of anonymity, vent theirgrievances in public for all the world to read. Imagine a site where students could be gossiped about and calumnied without control and where their parents and other students could read about them.
Viewing things from this angle should help you see how uncharitableand unkind what you are doing here really is. This is nothing more than aposting board for gossip, and it appeals to people's worstinstincts."
UCLA Department of Political Science
"Hi,
Your web page would probably be of more use if in addition to providing means of the numeric scores, you also provided medians. As you know from taking an introductory statistics course, means are not robust, and are heavily affected by extreme values. As it stands, a small number of respondents with very strong views (putting in ratings of 1 or 10) can significantly alter the numeric rating you display.
The median is probably a better summary measure in this situation since it is less vulnerable to extreme scores.
Better still, you should provide histograms of the distributions of the scores to facilitate interpretation."
UCLA Department of Sociology
