aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

The perfect storm of biased samples

The Chronicle looks at RateMyProfessor.com:

The name of that game is image management, and many professors are playing it.

“The main form of capital that a professor has is his or her reputation, his or her credibility as a knowledgeable, truthful person,” says Kenneth Westhues, a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, who has studied RateMyProfessors. “And so professors very attentively guard their reputations. That’s why they are so interested in RateMyProfessors.com.”

He says the practice of padding one’s ratings is rampant among professors. While conducting research for his 2004 study on the site, he found numerous instances of professors at his own institution trying to manipulate their ratings. He says he has never done that himself because he believes it’s unethical. He declined to “out” his colleagues but said it was funny to see how some described themselves.

Patrick Nagel, president of RateMyProfessors.com, says that a recent statistical analysis suggests as many as a quarter of its 2-million visitors each month are professors.