The Princeton Review recently released a new guide entitled The Best 300 Professors. The editors compiled the list from surveys conducted by the Princeton Review and by student evaluations submitted to RateMyProfessors.com.
According to the guide, surveys conducted by the Princeton Review “revealed the colleges at which students highly rated their professors’ teaching ability and accessibility. Data from RateMyProfessors.com identified more than 42,000 professors at those schools that students had rated on its site.”
The editors then came up with an initial list of 1,000 candidates that was later narrowed down to the 300 “best professors.”
Not one of the 300 professors selected teaches at a historically Black college or university. One wonders why there is not one professor from Spelman, Howard, Morehouse, Fisk, Hampton or some other HBCU on the list. Are only professors from the nation’s top-rated colleges included? No. There are professors on the list from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Miami Dade College, and Gainesville State College, to name a few.
Perhaps it is because the professors at HBCU’s are busy teaching and not promoting surveys. And then again, it may be because our students did not take the time to answer the surveys. Which ever the answer or if there is another reason, we need to follow through. Princeton Review makes a lot of our money even if some of it is in scholarships for students to prepare for standardized tests.
Greetings,
The report probably does what it was “designed” to do.
The reaction titled in this article seems to warrant further investigation and answers to questions regarding the initial research design, objectives, scope, limitations, intended sample population, sample size, and as well the type of data collection methodology deployed.
The exclusion could easily have been based on the data collecting vehicle the researcher(s) selected for this study. It appears that in this case the one such vehicle selected was called RateMyProfessors.com. If HBCU’s were making use of this vehicle for faculty evaluations and they were not included in the study then one could easily challenge the assumptions, rational, and the underpinning of the research design. Often the funding of the study is directly influenced by the scope and limitations of a research project as well.
In the ideal academic world it would seem fair to expect that any national academic study done by a prestigious university would use selection criteria that was more “inclusive” of faculty from a cross section of colleges and universities. The time for the fulfillment of such an expectation has not yet come!
Interesting question. Four professors from my institution made the list. To be honest, I dislike RateMyProfessors.com. So that vehicle in and of itself is problematic. There’s no institutional monitoring of that site. The reason why there were no professors from HBCU’s is probably owed to the lack of use by HBCU students. I think this is story about what population of student is more than likely to use such a medium to “rate professors.”