My negative reviews were benign compared to the absolutely hateful comments about some of my colleagues, who are among the most gifted and thoughtful teachers I know and whose evals I’m certain are above our very high departmental average; one of these people won a teaching award. Whatever. So I stopped checking the site.

As for making evaluations public, I was referring to just the numbers. At every place I’ve worked but one, these are scan-tron and can easily be compiled and posted. I see your implicit point, however, that the most useful part of evaluations is the narrative portion—which of course reveals a lot about why a negative evaluation is negative. I had one last term where the student marked all 1’s (bad!) and then commented that mine was the best class ever at JPU.

Another solution might be online evaluations, which unless mandatory have a low response rate. But I do think students should have access to what their peers think about us. For this reason I find RMP useful, though there is the danger of negative, even libelous, reviews becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. If some nutjob accuses me of being a misogynist, I worry that the students I’m already teaching will think I’m a misogynist because I spent only one class walking them through feminist theory.

My current institution puts the numbers for the 4 basic questions online. As they are about to revamp evals at the univ level, they will probably continue that with the beefed-up evals.

I don’t check my own RMP–last I heard (from my mom!) I wasn’t on there yet, and I’m holding to that thought.