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Comment by acangiano | Hacker News Reader

My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.

Or any inept or incompetent administrator who feels his or her position is threatened by this demonstration of a superior solution to what seems to be a widely faced problem.

This is so common even among mid managers in almost every big company I've known.

Ensure you kill innovation with any and every means you can, else the programmers will look smarter than you.

I write software for universities and have many experiences that confirm this. It need not necessarily be direct negative reviews, but the perception of power leaving the building or the hands of those who currently wield it. Universities do not normally face the same commercial pressures internally that a company would, so academics often don't take well to it.

Shitty software that management chose themselves and can control is always seen as a better option than letting students run the place.

I do webdev for a big hospital and when we brought up the possibility of patients reviewing their doctors, the doctors got really defensive.

Turns out professionals don't want to be held accountable for the quality of their work. Too bad for them public rating systems are inevitable.

Some of the defensiveness may come from professional pride... Teaching (and medicine?) is not as easy to rate as, say, a product on Amazon or an Ebay seller. Speaking as a sometime adjunct instructor at a research university, the "course evaluations" represent to me bringing corporate management theory to a theoretically more high-minded institution. As others have commented here, the pressure to publish lowers the priority of teaching for full-time faculty. Bringing in low-paid part-timers to teach is not a healthy response to this, and publicly rating/berating teachers is a band-aid on a situation already lacking in trust and respect.

In a healthy college of Yale's quality, course choices should come from competent individual advising of the students and student-to-student discussion, rather than from ratings and a scheduling algorithm.

Bad algorithms are bad and misused feedback is misused and competent advisers are competent.

"0/5, Recommended my child be put on the standard vaccine schedule."

> Turns out professionals don't want to be held accountable for the quality of their work.

This statement is not supported by the rest of your comment. Your comment supports a slightly different statement (which I also believe is true): professionals don't want customer-satisfaction ratings from a selection-biased poll to be considered as a rating of the quality of their work.

Because, why would they? That's a terrible metric.

Looks like ratemyprofessors.com is still kicking after ten (?) years.

A professor has no pull on an external site. But they can certainly raise a stink within their university.

When I went to UCSD back in the 80's there were the CAPE (Course and Professor Evaluation) books you could purchase. At the end of each quarter, questionnaires were left outside each lecture hall, and collected by a team of entrepreneurs. Some profs allowed the CAPE team to explain the how the rating system worked, but others just tolerated having the questionnaires distributed outside of class. In theory, UCSD could have prohibited this on campus, but they didn't. CAPE books were funny, with great comments and interesting artwork created to illustrate some of the funnier comments. But that was a different era, and physical books weren't as easy to disseminate compared to an website that shows how bad or good a prof/course is.

Ego. In my experience, most problems come down to ego.

Absolutely.

Consider the Assistant Deputy VP for Administrative Affairs who just got sold an official $20M "Enterprise Scale" solution for course registration that worked about as well as healthcare.gov, and a kid comes along and in a couple of weekends, makes something that works better and has more features.

Now the 'unofficial' solution is getting more and more popular and your gold-plated turd of a system that you staked millions of dollars of Official University Budget on is getting mocked mercilessly by the student body.

What do you do?

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