My son and I found these sites quite interesting. Too bad he had not seen these before choosing his classes.

RateMyProfessor

ProfessorPerformance

Of course, an individual's experience can vary greatly from the standard, so it is not always good to go by those sorts of ratings. Some things we have to discover for myself.
The worst thing, I think, is knowing that the professor you're going to have is terrible but you cannot graduate without that course and he is the only one who teachers it. Now that is agony.

There are a number of considerations to be kept in mind when consulting these sorts of boards:

1. Most postings are made by students who have strong feelings one way or another about a prof.

2. Most students base their evaluation on the grade they received.

3. Most students' expertise in pedagogy is non-existent and therefore have no idea why profs organize and teach a course in the manner they do.

4. Most boards do not have a representative enough sampling to make evaluations either valid or helpful.

5. Most students do not indicate to what extent their success or failure was due to their own performance.

This does not mean, however, that these evaluations cannot be helpful. Look for such things as consistent comments, either postive or negative. Look for comments that directly reflect the prof's teaching effectiveness (not "his suits are all from the 70's" or "she assigns too much reading") Finally, as alluded to above, remember that every evaluation is subjective, and generally only as accurate as each student's personal opinion may be.

I'm currently a college student and upon finding ratemyprofessor.com I ran all of my previous and current teachers through it. Out of 8 teachers, only 1 consensus on the site was fairly wrong. As juanruiz says, pay attention to consistency, that's very important with these types of sites.

Wow, is this an old thread! JT's son must be nearly done. Wonder where JT went to? One post last August, before that, one in May.