“Are Professors Ready to Make the Grade?”

“Are Professors Ready to Make the Grade?” by Jonathan Zimmerman

In “Are Professors Ready to Make the Grade,” Jonathan Zimmerman discusses Yale University’s failed effort to shut down a web site put together by Yale students. The web site shared past students’ evaluations of each professor with future students. Students argued that they had a right to this information, but Yale administrators argued that this information should not be made available to students because students don’t understand the reasons for the ratings, and they make poor decisions based on the misuse of this information.

For example, Zimmerman says, teachers may receive high ratings bot because they teach effectively, but because they give higher grades. For this reason, both college administrators and professors themselves may better judges of what qualities students need in a professor than the students themselves are. The students themselves don’t know what they need to advance. Moreover, the web site doesn’t promote constructive discussion about what students need. Therefore it doesn’t contribute to increasingly the quality of the students’ education.

Zimmerman does not believe that the Web site should have been shut down. However, he does worry that placing too much emphasis on student’s evaluation of professors may, over time, reward college teacher for being less demanding. This is not the reward system we want. Rather we should reward teachers for being more demanding, because the more demanding teachers probably work harder and do more to increase students’ understanding. In contrast, what actually happens when students have too much influence over a professor’s popularity is that their grades often go up even though their performance has not improv...

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...re more likely to succeed in the highly rated classes than lower ranked. This is the reason why Yale University should have not student down a site helping students to be successful in their classes.

In conclusion, this article does report the reason why Yale University should have not shut down a web site allowing students to rate their professors and to do extremely better in their courses. The more we come up with a good measure will indicate how intellectual and diplomatic students are. But most importantly, students should not depend or rely on the website allowing them to rate their professors before enrolling in a course, but rather study harder to attain their targets.

Works Cited

Tanfani, Joseph. “Keeping guns away from people with mental illness is a complex issue,”

Latimes.com. Los Angeles Time, September 21, 2013 Web. October 31 2013.