There's good news and there's bad news.

Good news: I kinda thought they'd throw away 80% of the evaluations and file a representative sample. Not so. There's a folder of evals for every professor, for every class, for the last 10 yrs the prof's been teaching. You're a law student. You like research. Go to it.

Be aware that going off the numerical scores is pretty useless because everyone uses a different mental scale to rate a professor. It also helps to know your own likes and dislikes. For example, I have a very low tolerance for disorganized or late teachers. Other people, not so much. But if I see 'disorganized' even a couple times in an eval folder, I move along.

Bad news: What you will find out is basically, most people like their classes and their professors. Which means one of two things. Either they are not evaluating them very critically, or they have bad taste. I looked up evaluations from professors I had who were objectively quite bad and they still got pretty good reviews. Did these people go to a different class than I did? Or were they just being kind? Anyways, as I went through, I discounted positive feedback somewhat, and paid a little extra attention to negative comments.

Good news: you do notice a clear difference in evaluation between good professors and great ones. There are some classes where people routinely write "best class I took" or "best professor at UCLA" and those are rare enough that they're worth paying attention to.

To my colleagues at UCLA, I highly recommend you use the evals as a background check on your professors. There are courses (eg. Wills, Bus Assoc, Evidence) where you will have a choice of professors and the evals are handy for ranking your preferences.

You will not find out who are "the best" professors -- there's no overall ranking (sadly). But on classes where you're on the fence, the evals can either push you to take a risk, or encourage you to run away. Far, far away.

12 Jul 05