Every High School student encounters a variety of different teachers. While a good teacher can make a notoriously hard class like AP Biology seem like less of a challenge, a bad teacher can make an easy class like Health seem like a bigger burden than it should be. Websites like www.ratemyteachers.com allow students to log on, find their school, and rate their teachers.
Upon further investigation, however, many teachers from high schools like Quince Orchard seemed to be missing, or had very few and unclear reviews. Additionally, rating teachers on websites like these is not very official and leaving reviews doesn’t really aid teachers because anybody can log on and write reviews.
With all of this in mind, it is fair to question whether or not high school students should be able to rate their teachers. Provided that these students are equipped with the right resources, I would definitely say they should be able to post ratings.
One beneficial resource would be the creation of an official, MCPS-sponsored platform that students could use to anonymously rate their teachers. This would ensure that teachers received legitimate feedback that pertains to matters such as teaching styles, strictness of grading, and classroom environment. Rating teachers anonymously would encourage students to be honest in their feedback and not refrain from saying certain things about a teacher.
On the contrary, some may argue that students aren’t going to take giving their teachers feedback seriously and that it will be hard to distinguish genuine responses from silly, unresponsive ones. However, a good solution to this would be to have the act of rating teachers be purely optional, as opposed to forcing students to “rate” their high school teachers for a completion grade.
One should also note that teachers are intelligent enough to recognize which responses are truthful and which aren’t. I recommend sending student feedback to the administration of the school the student attends, to allow the administration to know what student’s think of various teachers. Administrative officials could even take some of the advice to heart themselves for they, like teachers, interact with students throughout the school-year.
Consequently, while there are some cons, I’d say that allowing students to be able to “rate” their high school teachers and give feedback has an overwhelming amount of positives. This includes (and is not limited to) allowing teachers to understand what to improve for the new school year or semester, what they did right, what students thought of the classroom environment, and how hard the class is. Teachers talk all day as part of their job, but students who want to have their voice heard shouldn’t be shut down on the assumption that they have nothing to say in the first place.
Article by Moco Student staff writer Matthew Minton of Quince Orchard High School