Rank my professors : voting open
Hi,
With the kind help of Jojo, Tom and Olga we finally have a basic professors list . Voting is now open. Features of the professor directory currently includes:
- Registered logged in users will be allowed one vote per professor. I will soon bring up a page displaying professors by voting rank.
- Registered logged in users will be abllow to edit the professors details. Professor pages are WIKI style, so it will be possible to see the revisions on the changes made and revert them back if they're inappropriate.
Hope you'll find this satisfactory. Comments, thoughts and suggestions welcome.
Fair Ranking
I strongly insist on adding the feature of being able to give "minus" points to professors as well.
To avoid any unfairness, it could be done so that a negative vote can only go along with a short explanations or something like that...
Fair ranking
has little to do with what you "insist" on. I think that for the time being, keeping things on the positive side is the right way to go through with this. Once we see how well or not this is accepted we might be able to go through with more than that. Rushing into this kind of thing would be a mistake on our (/my) part, if we are (/I am) to try and get the university to accept what we're trying to do here.
Fili
Statistics and Guideline
what if we have the following case:
Prof A (very good) has a class of 18 students, and only two consider using this rating system = 2 points!
Prof B (average) holds one of our famous 60+ (MBA/PhD combined) classes, 4 students use the system = 4 points!
Which should be higher in the ranking? Some Profs give much more lectures than others, this also gives them an advantage...
Maybe after we notice the ranking system is being used we can at least calculate an arithmatic mean in a point-system from +1 to +5 for e.g.
(No negatives!!)
I have also attached a scan (sorry for the bad quality) of the universities assessment sheet for professors. This may (or may not) serve as a guideline for the editing part.
hohoho,
tom
Any system is flawed...
Professors with more courses/students might receive more points, true. But, with a 1 to 5 system there's the standard deviation problem - my 3 points might be a lot more positive than your 4 points, since you give 5 points to all the others while I give them 1. Statistics is very hard to do the right way.
This system here can not replace a surveying system by the university, it can just help see the vote of confidence some professors get from the students. I think a 0 or a 1 makes this easy to understand and follow - somebody with 5 points means there are 5 students registered on this site who voted for him. No more, no less. It's always possible to add comments, and those should help cancel out some of the effects you mentioned.
I still feel more comfortable with this system. Let's try it out for a while, and see how it goes.
Fili
Ok... Let's wait...
I'm sorry, I didn't mean it to sound this way.
You might be right, it's probably better for the time being... However, I strongly hope we'll get there some day...