Student scores not kind to UO profs

University of Oregon senior Dan Wieber, who will graduate Friday with a marketing degree, said he’s had nothing but great professors in the UO’s Lundquist College of Business his final two years of school.

“They’re willing to go out of the way and help you learn whatever they can,” Wieber said, working away on his laptop computer in the lobby of the UO’s Lillis Business Complex.

But his first two years at the UO?

“I had some pretty bad teachers,” Wieber said, remembering some graduate teaching fellows who did not speak English well and one economics professor he’d just as soon never see again.

“Really arrogant,” Wieber said. “He thought a lot of himself because he had a Ph.D. I see him walking around campus: I just kind of give him dirty looks.”

Could this help explain why, of the 62 specific top-20 rankings in the Princeton Review’s “The Best 376 Colleges,” the only one that the UO appears on is “Professors Get Low Marks”?

Ouch.

The UO didn’t even make the top 20 of the “Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians” list. Top honors there went to the New College of Florida, while two Portland colleges, Reed College (seventh) and Lewis & Clark (15th), made that list. Reed College is also only one of 11 schools that made the review with top scores of 99 for academics, matching heavyweights Harvard College and Stanford University.

The UO is listed as No. 7 on the “Professors Get Low Marks” list, behind, uh, the top-ranked New Jersey Institute of Technology, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y., the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the University of California-San Diego, and Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“Students trumpet out praise (for their schools), but also give criticism,” said Rob Franek, senior vice president of the New York City-based Princeton Review, and author of the 2012 edition of “The Best 376 Colleges.”

The Princeton Review got its name from its founder, John Katzman, in 1981 after he graduated from Princeton, the Ivy League school in New Jersey.

The company prepares standardized tests such as SATs, but also publishes books. Since 1992, it has published its annual compendium of the nation’s top colleges and universities, providing two-page profiles on each, along with the separate top-20 rankings of lists — from “Best Campus Food” to “Best Athletic Facilities” (how could the UO not make that list?) to “Happiest Students” to “Least Happy Students” (New Jersey Institute of Technology wins again!)

And where does all the information come from for these lists? Why, from the students themselves, Franek said in a telephone interview from New York City.

“I think students are the greatest messengers for their schools,” he said.

About 122,000 undergraduate students across the nation filled out 80-question online surveys during the 2010-11 school year to create the rankings, with an average of 325 students participating per school, Franek said. For larger universities such as the UO, it’s not uncommon to have more than 1,000 students participate, he said.

The question students answered that created the “Professors Get Low Marks” and “Professors Get High Marks” lists?

“How do you rate your instructors as teachers?”

Simple as that.

Is the UO just going to take that? No way.

University spokesman Phil Weiler said Sunday that Princeton Review surveys “are always pretty suspect,” with it often unclear who was surveyed and when they were surveyed. Faculty members at the UO, he added, “always receive very high marks in the evaluations we have done after individual classes. … Certainly, our experience does not match the experience that the Princeton Review is indicating.”

Weiler further said more students are coming to the UO than ever before. “Clearly, students are voting with their feet in choosing to come to the university,” he said.

Franek, who regularly visits campuses across the nation as part of his job, and who said he was on the UO campus three or four years ago and found it “a beautiful spot,” laughed when asked if the UO should be worried. But he added that some schools have been known to take action when they land on some of the less favorable lists. Residence halls and dining facilities sometimes get upgraded, or new rules concerning on-campus partying are changed, Franek said.

At least the UO can boast that its archrival, Oregon State University, is the only Pac-12 school that isn’t listed among the 376 top colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, Reed College, Lewis & Clark, Portland State University and Willamette University are other Oregon colleges on the list.

Princeton Review spokeswoman Jeanne Krier said OSU has never been on the list, while the UO has made it every year. However, OSU is listed in the review’s online edition under the 121 “Best in the West” colleges, Krier said.

Besides the 62 categories of top 20 lists, the review also provides more serious ratings based on information it gleans from the schools, and assigns them all an academic rating of between 60 and 99. With a rating of 69, the UO trails 322 schools on the list. But its environmental “green” rating of 96 is in the top 40 of the 376 listed.

And while OSU isn’t ranked as one of the 376 best schools, it is one of only 16 with a top green rating of 99.

A group of UO students hanging out last week at Taylor’s Bar & Grill on campus didn’t seem too worried about their professors being held in such low regard by some fellow students.

“I’m an education major and I’ve liked every one of my teachers,” said Anni Zahniser, who will be a senior this fall.

“I’ve had some pretty cool professors,” said Matt Goff, a journalism major who will be a junior. “Some I didn’t like so much, but I’ve thought they were all fair.”

Senior Melissa Hollis, a double major in anthropology and psychology, said she, too, likes all of her professors, but she has heard some horror stories.

“I don’t think that I’ve really had a bad experience, but I’ve heard some things that are bad,” she said. “There was, like, one math teacher who got fired. He was, like, abusive.”

So, what school loves its professors the most, according to the survey? That would be Wellesley College near Boston. And students at Reed College in Portland must really like their professors, too, because Reed ranks third on the “Professors Get High Marks” list.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the UO’s profile in the 2012 edition of the Princeton Review says UO students think “Athletic facilities are great” and “Everyone loves the Ducks.”