The path of least resistance – It seems to be the path chosen to many college students. While Web sites such as Ratemyprofessors.com and CampusBuddy.com provide a seemingly noble service, they make it easier for students to not challenge themselves, and have helped create a generation of young people who feel they’re not paying for an education, but rather for the small white piece of paper handed to them at the end of their four years of attendance.
The issue - The professor rating Web sites have on a student’s scheduling habits.
Our position - Some of these sites provide students easy access to important information – like grade frequencies, percent of students passed and failed, etc – that are making it more simple for students to build the easiest schedule possible, forgetting the reason we’re here is to be challenged culturally and intellectually.
Robert Frost’s quote about taking the road less traveled is such a common colloquialism, it’s almost a cliché. Regardless of the possible writing faux pas that comes along with beginning an editorial with a cliché, it’s important to note that most college students do not follow Mr. Frost’s ideal.
For most of us, the road less travelled is better left to someone else. We put more effort in holding out for late afternoon classes, registering for the easiest courses and finding the easiest professors.
The latter is getting easier by the semester, it seems. Web sites such as Ratemyprofessors.com and CampusBuddy.com offer students peer opinion on professors, and in the latter’s case, the actual grade frequencies of nearly all a school’s teachers.
While this at first seems an incredible help to students – after all, the last thing any of us wants is a semester dealing with professors who are impossible to work with, and they do exist here at SVSU – it also creates a culture of indolence.
There are a number of things offered by a university – a new social network, a mind-opening experience, the opportunity to visit and explore different cultures and countries that for most are a world away. However, the cardinal charge of an institution is providing its students the best education their money can buy, and preparing them for the rest of their life by helping them to learn how to deal with difficult tasks through progressive thinking and problem solving.
These things aren’t gained by filling our schedules with the classes so easy we can get away with showing up 30 percent of the time and turning in work we know is substandard. Settling like this is a terrible habit to stumble into. We should create our party schedule around our school schedule, not the other way around.
And sure, we all have a class or two we just need to fill credits – something else that should rise contempt in even the most languid student. These sites help us
With that, these sites do carry serious merit. Without them, underclassmen and transfer students would be left with even less an idea of what to expect on the first day of each semester, and, in the case of CampusBuddy.com, important information on the grading practices of those teaching.
For students looking to challenge themselves, a site such as CampusBuddy helps show which professors are too difficult, which ones are challenging and fair, and which are barely as interested in attending class as the kid in the back who can’t help but snore through his one o’clock class. So keep in mind, we could be mortgaging our future because some spited student gave their professor an expletive laden review.
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