Other colleges have decided to use evaluations forms from other universities.

The School of Music within the College of Visual and Performing Arts uses a commercially-available teacher evaluation form, said Harold Kafer, Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

The school of music has found the forms to be more flexible, detailed and specific, Kafer said.

The form comes from the evaluation center of the University of Washington, an academic service provider that has done a fair amount of research in the field of teaching evaluations.

Online evaluation forms

A faculty team within the College of Visual and Performing Arts also worked on developing a new set of evaluation forms and techniques for the last couple years, including an online form, Kafer said.

Convenience and student motivation make on online evaluation system improbable, though he believes online forms will be available in the future for most universities as an alternative, Kafer said.

“Handing out evaluation forms is preferred [over online evaluation forms] because you have a captive audience, and you have the opportunity to get on-the-spot feedback,” Kafer said.

Independent Web sites

Some students have found new and more immediately-gratifying ways to express opinions of professors by using independently-run online teacher evaluation Web sites.

One such site, www.ratemyprofessor.com, allows students to rate high school and college professors on criteria: ease, clarity, helpfulness, interest in the class before they took the class and optionally whether teachers are hot or not hot.

The Web site also allows them to leave comments about professors, with defamatory comments deleted sporadically. The Web site features 5,415 schools, 669,714 professors and about 4.5 million ratings in its database as of Nov. 8, 2005.

Freshman business major John Haseman started using the Web site when he came to NIU.

“The ratings and comments do give you a general idea [about a professor],” he said. “The ratings on www.ratemyprofessor.com shouldn’t be taken too seriously. They are just opinions from past students and you shouldn’t base your entire decision on taking a class or not on the ratings.”

Baseman said he thinks the hotness ratings are funny.

Sophomore history major Tawny Bates said she thinks the hotness ratings “add a little something extra to the rating system.”

“I know of people that select the classes based on the “hot” rating,” Bates said.

As of Nov. 8, NIU’s average professor rating was ranked 602 out of the 5,415 schools registered on the site’s databases. NIU has an average professor rating of 3.63 out of 5.0 and 9,048 ratings.

The top five highest rated professors at NIU have an average rating of 5.0. The top professors in DeKalb are marketing professor Rick Ridnour, with 11 ratings; education professor Molly Swick, with 11 ratings and four “hot” ratings; Joel Stafstrom, associate professor of biological sciences, with 10 ratings and five “hot” ratings; Christopher Nissen, associate professor of foreign languages and literature, with nine ratings; and Will Anderson, a past communication professor, with seven ratings and two “hot” ratings.

Stafstrom said he is flattered by his high rating and would like to know how to become number one. However, he said he does not put a lot of weight on the Web site.

“I don’t take www.ratemyprofessor.com seriously,” he said. “The ratings are based on a small sample.”