Rate My Professors?

[klmama]

My college senior has had four years of great professors thanks to always reading RMP comments before registration.  Dc loves some profs for the same reasons that other students hate them, so the numerical ratings are essentially useless; however, the details in the comments are extremely valuable.    

[ieta_cassiopeia]

On 3/6/2021 at 5:12 AM, Bootsie said:

How do students know if a professor is an inconsistent grader?  I know that we have various questions on our evaluations about professor graded fairly, consistently, and equitably.  Because students do not see all of the grades/papers and do not see the final grades of other students, I do not know how they can effectively evaluate this. They may know some other students in the class, but probably not all other students.  Do enough other students really hand them their papers and that person read the entire paper and evaluate it?  Is the student really in a position to evaluate it?  This has always puzzled me.

I have seen some situations of "I know it was graded unfairly because I didn't get the same grade as Sally"--well you are correct, you have the same answers as Sally and a different grade than Sally becasue the numbers in your problems are different than the numbers in Sally's problems.  

Several potential methods (assuming of course that the argument in a given case is well-founded; accusing stuff on inadequete evidence is also a thing, especially in environments where the student/teacher relationship is very poor):

If the professor gives any sort of mid-term assessments (even ones that don't get counted towards the grade, such as pop quizzes), marks that don't match the provided rubric (if there was one, especially if the rubric was nominally an objective one).

Also, if two students wrote a similar assessment item for the same or materially similar question, and got very different grades. (as you say, students doing different questions can't do this approach).

Significant differences in the marking of mid-term assessments cannot be accounted for by differences in the questions or by material introduced or reasonably assumed to have been encountered by students (e.g. in outside research) between those times, or differences that would explain such marking were not communicated by agreed methods (usually, those laid down in the department handbook, provided in course preparation materials or stated at the start of the first class). This covers lecturers who change rubrics for no coherent reason.

Differences in how papers were marked, compared with exemplar papers (if these were provided).

Track record of successful appeals, especially on academic grounds (the latter are as rare as hen's teeth, so even one can cause a reputation for inconsistent marking, even if it was the only time it ever happened).

Students talk to each other about their grades, and are generally confident in stating inconsistency is across the board even if they themselves are aware of only one or a few examples in their class. (Students tend to keep electronic copies of their papers, so if they don't like a mark, they can easily swap it with their friends to attempt that sort of analysis).

[easypeasy]

My girls have found that, when there's enough reviews to detect a pattern, the negative reviews are pretty accurate. You can usually tell the difference between a truly bad review and someone who was lazy all semester and whining about their grade. When there's a pattern of "rude," or "inconsistent," or "unorganized" it usually holds true.