Pick-a-Prof up at Pitt

It’s been a long time coming — but it’s finally here.

Past Student Government Boards have… It’s been a long time coming — but it’s finally here.

Past Student Government Boards have talked about bringing an online professor evaluation site to Pitt students, and this week it has finally come to fruition.

After campaigning on this issue, Board member Joe Pasqualichio has worked out a year-long, free — excluding a $200 one-time joining fee, paid by SGB — trial of Pick-a-Prof for Pitt’s campus.

But just because the site is up now, doesn’t make it a success –yet.

“Most important is a lot of students use it,” Pasqualichio said. At some schools about 80 percent of the student body uses the site. The more students that use it, the more value it serves in providing a wide range of opinions for students to base their own evaluations on, he added.

The site allows students to fill out a questionnaire about the professor’s teaching style, including such information as the importance of attending lecture, whether or not the grading is done fairly and the size of the workload. It also provides a place to write about the teacher — reviews are read by the site’s managers before being posted for profanity and vulgarity — and for students to give a bit of personal information about themselves such as their overall QPA and the grade the student expects in the class. That information helps students evaluate the critique — even though there is no way to prove that the answers given are honest.

This site, unlike some other sites, also allows professors to provide their own information, whether it is personal or information explaining their teaching style depends upon the individual.

Questions for the questionnaire are customized according to each school. For Pitt’s set of questions, Pasqualichio and others asked students what questions they would like to see included. And with the help of SGB’s Academic Affairs Committee, a set of questions was assembled and put onto the site.

This project — unlike many of SGB’s other projects — provides something tangible for students to see and use regularly, according to Pasqualichio.

As to why this Board, unlike others, has succeeded with this project, he said, “There was an attitude of we’re going to do it this time.”

If students use the site and it proves to be of value, SGB would use money from the Student Activities Fee to fund its continuance. Some sites, according to Pasqualichio, cost about $4,000 annually to run; however, there is a chance that the site would become free for universities to access if it begins to use advertising.

Pasqualichio expects that the use of the site may be a bit slow at first because final-exam time is nearing, but after finals he hopes the usage rate will increase.

By using an outside site rather than a site run by SGB, which was proposed earlier on, SGB does not have to worry about legal issues that may arise with the evaluations because Pick-a-Prof already has its own set of lawyers.

Pasqualichio intends to send a letter to faculty members regarding the new site, and how they can use it to inform students and to explain that this site is not meant to act as a place to just bash professors.

An information session for students may also take place in the fall to teach students about the benefits of the site, but the most important form of publicity the Board is using is word of mouth.

The site can be accessed at www.pickaprof.com.