Here’s a good example of

Here’s a good example of new information disturbing the sleepy status quo. A web site at Williams college (called Factrak) lets students anonymously rate their professors. The faculty doesn’t like it. Of course they don’t like it; having people anonymously rate you in a publicly availaible forum is hard for anybody. But what can you do? There’s absolutely no way to stop it. The profs will have to accomodate themselves to this new state of affairs. There are some juicy catty remarks in the article, such as this one by an auditor of university president Morton Schapiro’s popular economy class: “By the end of the course, I think I’ll know more about his Nobel Prize-winning ‘friends’ than microeconomics.” Those uppity students don’t know what’s good for them. Here’s the article (from the Boston Globe): Student Web site for rating faculty riles Williams College. [This link will be defunct soon, since the Globe reaper pulls its content from view after a while. Read it while you can]

One of the fears mentioned by the disapproving faculty members was the specter of grade inflation. If you know you’re being rated every day, will you pander to the crowd? Will you become an affable but ineffective buffoon, or will you risk cyber-humiliation to hold back the tide of rising grades? This
column on grade inflation in the New York Times supports the view that students who expect high grades get them and further that students who get bad grades give bad reviews.