Well, I am not sold. First, a disclosure of potential conflict of interest - I am a professor. Of Chemistry. I have never been rated on the site. Several of my friends and colleagues have. And in the process of watching this happen, I have noticed several things.
First and foremost, remember that the ratings are being done by students. The ratings are voluntary. And they have to remember that the site exists, and be motivated enough to go find it, and type something in. And therein lies the rub. All of the ratings I have read are either incredibly complimentary, or incredibly negative. There is very little in between. This should come as no shock to anyone. Students are no different than any other information consumer. People don't write letters to the editor unless they are ticked off. And students don't write comments on RMP unless they were either thrilled with the class or hated it. And the professor along with it. This leads to some very skewed evaluations. As a veteran of many student evaluation cycles, I can tell you that every evaluation I have ever had has had a very broad distribution, not the all-or-nothing comments you find on sites like RMP.
Second, the sample of students commenting is VERY small. I have a friend who has been evaluated frequently on RMP. She teaches at a small university, but even there, two students out of the 150 or so that she teaches every year MIGHT comment on RMP. This is hardly representative of the opinion of the class.
And the entire question of whether students, in the throes of a challenging (we hope) class, are accurate evaluators of teaching performance is open for debate. Some research has suggested that only 16 to 25% of the distribution of student learning is correlated to student evaluations. A much higher positive correlation exists between students grades and expected grades and the ratings that they give. Students who are doing well in the course love the professor, and those who aren't, don't. What do you think the evaluations of IRS auditors would be if they were done by the people being audited?
So this gives rise to a real question - how much of a service do sites like RMP really provide? If only one or two percent of my enrolled students are commenting, and then only if they are angry with me, or their grades, or in love with my teaching, or their grades, is there anything meaningful at all about the rating? Other than that chili pepper by my name... I want that!
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