You're reading: Students take advantage of professor rating sites to improve education

Assessing professors is becoming an essential driver for improving the quality of education in Ukraine as websites like prouniver.com, professorrating.ru and univerlife.com provide a platform for university students to grade their teachers.

On prouniver.com, teachers can be rated based on a five-point
scale, and a comments section is provided. Usually comments are written
anonymously.

ProfessorRating.ru allows users to rate each teacher
characteristic on a one-to-five scale, such as: ability to convey subject
matter, exam difficulty, practical use of the course, humor, the use of visual
and technical learning tools, and the captivation of the subject.

Univerlife.com, another professor-rating website, lets users even
rate a professor’s attitude toward bribes.

Aleksandr Smirnov, prounivercom’s administrator, said he was
interested in creating a website which would allow students to “to share
their impressions and stories that relate to their teachers.” Covering the
maximum amount of universities was a key element of the service that assesses
teachers from Belarus, Latvia, Russia and Ukraine.

The webpage has approximately 10,000 regular visitors, said Smirnov.
Fighting bribery-taking among university professors is a major task of the service,
he added.

Yuriy Mitrofanov launched his professorrating.ru in 2010 to service
Russia’s Omsk region. By 2013 it already covered the whole of Russia, Belarus,
Kazakhstan and Ukraine.

According to Mitrofanov, professorrating.ru has approximately
10,000 to 15,000 visitors per day enabling them to reach around 400,000 per
month. “The database currently has over 1,600 universities, more than 136,000
teachers and is about to reach 300,000 ratings and reviews,” he said.

For instance, the U.S.-based ratemyprofessors.com has a database
of 1.3 million professors and 7,000 schools, and 4 million visitors visit the
website each month.

There
is still extensive room for the websites’ development. For instance, professorrating.ru does not have a single professor from
Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, which is Ukraine’s second best university, according to a rating
conducted by Korrespondent weekly magazine in 2013.

Both Smirnov and Mitrofanov said sometimes professors ask to
remove their information or the ability for one to comment. Yet other times
professors share their personal and professional information with a website.
“We enjoy working with the Ukrainian audience; they constantly send us requests
with a list of professors for particular universities to add to the website,”
said Mitrofanov. 

“The nicest teacher ever,” reads a comment on a
prouniver.com page for Andriy Baumeyster, who teaches medieval philosophy at Kyiv
Taras Shevchenko University. “Wish you a good wife!” reads another
one.

Serhiy Golovashchenko, an associate professor of history of
religion at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, enjoys a high 4.14 score for his academic
expertise and having an anti-bribery attitude. “I haven’t noticed any new
knowledge after going to his lectures. He entertained – that’s for sure, but
didn’t teach,” reads one of the comments on him.

Golovashchenko has been teaching at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy since
1994. “You start to teach remembering what you didn’t have when
you were a student… Let them (students) receive what you wanted in the past,” he
told the Kyiv Post.

The
professor says social media provides a perfect opportunity for students to
discuss their professors, though in the past his university had a special forum
for this purpose.

“Univerlife.com
is very episodic… It doesn’t represent a professor,” he said. “Yet, if people
write more positive about you than bad – that’s already good.”

Kyiv Post website editor Ilya Timtchenko
can be reached at [email protected].