Want to know which Cal Poly San Luis Obispo professor "seems a few French fries short of a happy meal?" Which one sometimes barks in class or drinks beer with students at a local pub?
Well, there's an Internet Web site for you, designed by a couple of Cal Poly roommates who decided that students should know what they're in for when they sign up for a course.
Their two-month-old site posts anonymous, sometimes caustically humorous, sometimes earnest student evaluations of the university's faculty.
Student ratings of professors, both formal and informal, have long been standard on campuses nationwide. Now they are migrating to the Internet, that great giver of voice to anyone who can click a mouse.
Under growing pressure to make public the typically confidential, in-class evaluations that students fill out at course end, some institutions, such as Stanford and the University of Washington, have started posting them on the Web or giving data to student association Web sites.
That has not happened at Cal Poly--though it may yet, thanks to the emergence of the underground Web site.
Seniors Forrest Lanning and Doug Dahms say the site grew out of their interest in computers--Dahms is a computer science major--and their frustration with bad professors.
Last year, Lanning, an architectural engineering major from San Jose, said he wound up in a class "that was absolutely awful," even though he had asked others about it before enrolling.
Clearly, he thought, there was a need for more input. So Lanning and Dahms created "Polyratings," where about 400 of Cal Poly's 1,000 full-time faculty have thus far been anonymously critiqued, often rather colorfully.
Consider these assessments:
"Flaming idiot."
"She is hot."
"Awesome."
"I would not recommend this DINOSAUR of a professor."
"Why did Barnum & Bailey overlooked [sic] his one?"
There are tips about what to expect:
"She . . . will most likely bring up her daughter or her time spent at UCLA at least once a lecture."
"Lectures were very unclear. . . . But if you like to drink beer at Spikes, he will go with you."
"Not a bad class for an early morning nap."
"He brought us homemade brownies and some other good stuff at our final."
"She magically transformed into a dog in the middle of a lecture."
The evaluations are by no means all like that. A number are straightforward reviews of teaching skills, tests and homework loads, often favorable.
