At the end of every academic quarter, soon to be semester, Northeastern students complete evaluations of their professors and the courses they have taken. Now, students across the nation have the option of going online and posting evaluations of their professors where they have free reign to be as nice, or not so nice as they please.

ProfessorPerformance.com, a Web site that boasts a database of evaluations on more than 10,000 individual professors teaching at U.S. colleges and universities, provides this forum and encourages students to look up a professor before registering for classes.

“When I was in college we always checked the professor evaluation book compiled by the university before registering for a class,” said Dave Massey, associate professor of mathematics and one of three NU professors evaluated on the Web site. “As a professor now, I take my student evaluations very seriously.”

Massey sits down at the end of every quarter and reads through the evaluations the mathematics department asks students to complete and uses those to assess himself. He says that on a site such as ProfessorPerformance.com, it is likely that one would find evaluations on both ends of the spectrum, but not many in between.

“A Web site like this one where the evaluations are individual students giving their opinions is not as comprehensive as the ones at Northeastern where the final evaluation is a summary of a number of students giving their opinions,” Massey said. “Online you will probably get really really good evaluations and really really bad ones, but not much in the middle.”

Ed Klotzbier, director of university communications, echoed Massey’s sentiments.

“I don’t know how reliable this [Web site] could be when it is basically just one student weighing in on the professor listed,” Klotzbier said.

Massey admitted that it feels good to see that a student would post a positive evaluation of him, receiving a “grade” of A+. The other NU professors evaluated on the site, however, may not be as satisfied with their grades.

Richard Swasey, a professor in the College of Business Administration, received an F in his only evaluation on the site.

“I support the right of free speech, as long as it is not dangerous or slanderous,” Swasey said. “I support it even if it is as foolish and unhelpful as the work product of the unknown writer of the ProfessorPerformance.com “evaluation” of me.”

Swasey also said that these types of evaluations are useful tools, but only one of many, and that he stands by his teaching reputation.

“I am a recipient of the University-wide Excellence in Teaching award as well as a College of Business ‘Best Teacher’ finalist for the last four years running, all of which are honors generated by my former and current students,” Swasey said.

Kasey Kerber, who originally started the Web site as Myprofessorsucks.com, got the idea after having a bad experience with a night class he was taking in the fall of 2000 at the University of Nebraska.

“The textbook was written by the professor and was about as understandable as a VCR manual written in Japanese,” Kerber said. “He wasn’t much better.”

Kerber went home one night after that particular class and came up with the idea for a bulletin board site. This eventually evolved into ProfessorPerformance.com.

“It has always been my intention and my staff’s to create a valuable resource for students. We feel that students have the right to see professor evaluations.”

Klotzbier agrees that evaluations of NU professors are important and says Northeastern pays close attention to them.

“Northeastern has an interest in student reviews of professors,” he said. “That is why we ask students to complete evaluations at the end of each course.”

While students do not put their names on evaluations they fill out after completing a course at Northeastern, professors can still get an idea of how they are received by their classes. The one thing that Kerber says is a setback in university evaluations today is that students do not get to see the other evaluations.

“Our site fills the void, allowing students to post evaluations just like they would at the end of a semester – with the twist of also being able to view what their classmates have to say.”

Kerber says that there are many professors who do not take his site seriously, though he feels it is as having “unlimited potential as a tool of change.” According to Kerber, professors who do not take his site seriously are losing an opportunity to use feedback as an “active agent of change.”

Kerber has received feedback from students and professors from both ends of the spectrum: some very happy and others not so pleased. Though some may see ProfessorPerformance.com as a tool for disgruntled students to verbally attack professors, he argues that 60 to 70 percent of the posts on the site are positive reviews. Also, more than half of the 10,000 professors evaluated on the site have received a grade of B+ or higher.

“While there are some students who feel our site should be used to warn classmates about professors they’d be fools to take, there is also a larger majority of students who tell their classmates which professors they would be a fool to miss,” Kerber said.

Massey agrees that this is a valuable tool for students if used properly and should be used as such. He also says that he hopes a site such as this will make more of an effort to be more comprehensive in compiling numerous evaluations for each professor listed.

“You can have a class of 35 and 33 love you while you get two terrible evaluations,” he said. “All of them are important, and need to go into a comprehensive evaluations of an educator.”