If anything you would think professors would welcome reviews. They already get reviewed anyways. It's just word of mouth. At least a student could see a much wider range of opinions vs one person's experience.
What we're pushing back against is these reviews getting turned into yet another semi-useless, noisy and biased metric we're evaluated by.
You want to recommend for/against a class to your friends? Don't care. What I'm not interested in is my dean pretending there's deep insight there.
It should not be used as precise metric of performance, but as a general trend overall. Instead of one friend giving a bad review for whatever reason, now I have access to the hundreds of bad experiences or the 99/100 good experiences.
As a student I really don't care about the dean professor relationship. I am a paying customer of the institution. I want to know if that professor is worth taking their class.
Also if you don't care about students giving praise/negative reviews to a friend, that kind of says something.
Note I didn’t say I didn’t care what those reviews were. Honestly, they’re probably more nuanced than student Evans and thus more useful in choosing classes.
We agreed to not launch the system, in exchange for limited access to the data, as I described above.
Professors en masse opposed opening up this data. That opposition alone made me feel we were doing good work. If they had to stand by their public reviews, hopefully they could stand by the quality of the instructional experience provided.
I ended up making a startup to deal with issues like this, to sell SaaS solutions directly to student governance groups, rather than to institutions. Both control fairly significant budgets (student governance groups at mid-to-large sized institutions have 6/7 figure budgets to easily afford enterprise pricing). My platforms are student-first. It's more a passion project than trying to get me Zuckerberg levels of wealth.
Personality, difficulty, ability to teach (relatively), understanding the student's pressures etc.
When I say difficulty, I mean easiness (people take the class to improve the gpa) or difficulty as in: the professor wants to make an example.
Student's pressures: Does the professor demand more than a reasonable amount of time from the student?
----
All of this being said: I haven't seen a pragmatically taught course before. (As in the professor looks at the course as a means and is the person that helps facilitate the student through it) I think that's what students really look for.