Thank you for checking out ASPSU’s Online Professor Evaluation Website. This website is a forum to help facilitate students in choosing classes that best fit their needs. We also hope that professors will find the tools this site provides helpful in gathering feedback from students. ASPSU has found that this is a service that has been requested by students for many years. While there are national sites that offer to collect some data, I believe that this new site will provide a much better service to all involved.

While many departments use the university sponsored evaluation program at the end of the term, it is also important to realize that many do not. Additionally, through our research, students are unable to access any of the data collected from these evaluations. ASPSU sees the benefit of departments collecting this data for their internal use, but we are frustrated that it is not always collected and never distributed to students.

Our current system of providing feedback about professors is not an effective one. Students spend the first two weeks of the term running around asking everyone they know about the professors in their departments. Students often sign up for two to three times the amount of credits they actually plan on taking, dropping classes as they attend, realizing that the class is not for them. There are many informal networks setup to gather this information, but these systems often require advance knowledge, like knowing that livejournal.com has a PSU community. Some students are savvy enough to send e-mails to professors asking for advance copies of syllabi, but this is used rarely and is not an effective means of gathering information for student or professor alike.

We hope this website will alleviate much of this ineffective, time consuming, often unreliable process of gathering information on classes at PSU. Our website is a simple survey site that allows evaluation of all professors teaching at PSU. Any person with an internet connection will have the ability to browse the site and view ratings and postings. Evaluations are broken down into two categories that seek feedback in both quantitative and qualitative data formats. Students will have the ability to rank a professor based on five questions, including effectiveness of teaching the presented material and the availability of the professor outside the classroom.

There is also an opportunity for the student to post brief comments about their overall experience in the class. While viewing is allowed by anyone, it is important to remember that only people using a webmail account, with their e-mail address ending in “@pdx.edu,” will be able to post their ratings to the website. This has been done to add to the legitimacy of the posted feedback. It is important to us that we ensure true Portland State student feedback when rating professors.

In ASPSU we have worked with many faculty members in many departments with the creation of this website. There have been many concerns brought to us and we have worked hard to alleviate the issues that have been identified. This site will continue to change and grow as new needs are identified and as more students use this site. We appreciate any comments or questions you may have for us and will continue to make certain that this website remains a valuable tool for all students at PSU.

You will also see that we have partnered with BookGhost.com, a PSU student owned book exchange. BookGhost.com was created by students that are dedicated to the idea that there is always an alternative. They created a cheap, efficient way for every college student to utilize the Internet to buy or sell textbooks right on PSU’s campus.

BookGhost.com works with a variety of student groups on campus that will receive the majority of the money that is charged as a posting fee for use of their site. Portland State is a university on the rise and these founding students felt that there was a responsibility to help support these student groups along with the services they provide the entire student population. Therefore, it is the goal at BookGhost.com to always keep the interests and well being of the students first.