Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Faculty members tend to loathe online evaluation services like Rate My Professors and Pick A Prof because the sites don’t give them a chance to respond to hypercritical students. But students might not like the sites so much if professors could log on, defend themselves, and turn the evaluation process into an academic version of Crossfire.

But one site has decided it will take its chances and open itself up to the beleaguered educators. Rate My Teachers, which bills itself as “the leading Web site for middle- and high-school students to comment on their teachers,” has unveiled a “rebuttals” page that may help some teachers deflect criticism — if they can manage to convince anyone that debating seventh-graders on a message board is a hallmark of pedagogical discretion.

At present, none of the major evaluation sites for college students let professors talk back.