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Find your next professor, the right way.
Students at Hunter College use the site RateMyProfessors (RMP) to evaluate and choose their professors. RMP is a widely used application across campuses in America, where students can review former professors. Students both generate and receive the site's content.
While the service has its faults, the main problem with RMP is its loose community standards, often leading to site abuse by disgruntled students. The sites is filled with scathing reviews, a leading reason why professors avoid the site.
This is not to say that professors shy away from receiving student reviews. Professors often encourage student course evaluations. A mid to high percentage of students write course evaluations. These student evaluations are then entered to a database accessible to both faculty and students at the college.
Technically, Hunter students could rely on the information from this database instead of RMP. This database provides more evaluation data than RMP but without the harsh words. However, the problem with this database is the way information is displayed. Mainly, 1) no option to aggregate course evaluation and 2) content information needs to be displayed in a user friendly way.
We are Evalyo, a team of computer science students at Hunter College. Our team is working on our data-science capstone project, and we envision a web application to improve the Teacher Evaluation site at Hunter. We would use modern web frameworks to improve the current the site, adding the following features:
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Professor Based Querying: Instead of receiving a list of courses with a professor that matches your result, queries will aggregate the courses to a single professor. Also, another feature would show when a professor which semester a professor teacher a course (spring, summer, fall, winter, etc).
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Historical Aggregation: Students will be able to see a professors rating across multiple semesters, the number will be in a total average that weights recent semesters more heavily.
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Student Friendly Design: Current data presents information with an obtuse language. The app would reduce metrics from a total of 20+ to five key metrics.
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Feature Friendly: With the historical data, the sky is the limit in the way we present information.
Our team is going to the web framework, REACT (made by Facebook), to present the app with modern design in mind. Moreover, we would use a relational database known as MongoDB that would allow for more interesting ways to present the data.
By contributing the teacher evaluation data, we can create an application that could be used by hundreds of students. Instead of using a site that leads to abuse, such as Rate My Professors, students can use the Evalyo and obtain legitimate course evaluation data. Teachers already use those evaluations, so it's just a matter about how the information is presented to the students.
The app can serve as a prototype for the College to pursue a more complete project. Also the value of saving thousands of dollars in an application prototype that's benefitial for both faculty and the student population.
The college can be assured that this project would only be for learning purposes and will not be distributed without the approval of the college.