Not only is coursework going online, but so are teacher evaluations.

At that is a good thing, according to University of North Carolina student Ian Richardson:

When it came time to write our end of semester teacher reviews, I knew it was the perfect time to exact my revenge. I spent extra time laboring to find the most effective words possible to communicate my enormous frustration and dismay with the class. When I turned in the review, I was quite pleased with myself. While the review did not capture every agonizing second of the class, it did effectively sum up my feelings, and the feelings of every person I encountered in the class.

When I saw this professor walking freely in the pit, I was struck with the reality of the situation. Maybe he had read some of the reviews, but he had certainly not taken a single one to heart. As an older gentleman, he has no doubt received these types of reviews on a year to year basis, and become impervious to their effects. Yet, this ignores the very purpose of the evaluation. Why else, other than receiving feedback for correcting their teaching style, would a professor have an evaluation? Students in his class, eerily similar to myself, had expressed my very sentiments ad naseum throughout his career. Yet, the class continues to be taught in the same manner year after year.

Such a situation has without doubt contributed to the plethora of online class reviews springing up across the internet. The growth of such online class reviews allows students access to a forum in which they may express their most honest opinions of a class or professor. In the aforementioned end of class evaluations, only the professor is allowed to read the words written by the students. But the online reviews open this up to anyone who cares to look. The benefits of this are immeasurable and obvious. Before even registering for a class, a student can see the grade distribution of the class as well as descriptions of the professor’s teaching style.

By revealing this information to the public, without any editing whatsoever, teacher evaluations have become exponentially more valuable. Now, professors can be held accountable by the students they teach in the public realm. …

With all this in mind, it appears imperative to search out every class review to be found before registering for a class. With the staggering amounts of information at our disposal, it is foolish to allow yourself to fall into the void of a deplorable class.