“Students in the class now are helping students who never took it.”
– Raymond Duncan, Student Association speaker of the Senate

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee students can read evaluations of professors and their classes before registering through PantherProf, a free Web site that was created last year but is incredibly under-utilized.

“Usage is about 10 percent of all students,” said Raymond Duncan, speaker of the Senate, who helped launch PantherProf. “There are 120,000 surveys done every year; every student might take five or six surveys each.”

PantherProf is competing for students with Pick-A-Prof, a once Student Association-sponsored Web site.

“Pick-A-Prof had bought reflectors — they bought pantherprof.org, pantherprof.com and those things misrepresent their product,” Duncan said. “That’s something unfair that they’re doing.”

Every UWM student receives an e-mail near the end of the fall and spring semesters, encouraging them to use PantherProf. If a student were to visit www.pantherprof.com, they would be directed to Pick-A-Prof. This leads to confusion and draws students away from the actual PantherProf site: https://www3.uwm.edu/pantherprof/.

PantherProf was created in 2005 after 2,500 students responded to an online survey, which spawned the PantherProf action team. That team, which Duncan co-chaired, created PantherProf.

The idea of PantherProf was initially met with criticism from UWM faculty, Duncan said.

“Teachers thought seeing a grading history would slant students towards a certain professor,” he said.

PantherProf now offers students the ability to view the grades students predicted they would receive when they completed, as well as a good idea of the course work and how the class is graded.

The site also provides information on the nature of class and the type and amount of work. As the Web site says, PantherProf is a communication Web tool for students, rather than an evaluation tool of faculty and teaching staff.

“Students in the class now are helping students who never took it,” Duncan said. “This helps international students, new students, students who don’t have a large circle of friends to go to find out which person they should take based on what their ability is and what they would like out of the class.”

The cost of PantherProf is about $13,000 for three years per student, compared to $10,000 per year with Pick-A-Prof, Duncan said. The money comes out of the Educational Technology Fee, which is 1 percent of paid tuition — a rate that never changes.

“The SA is working on our needs to continue to work on the promotion of the product,” said Duncan, who also created a Facebook group to help increase awareness and student use. Duncan hopes that SA will help PantherProf to be more integrated with what students do, as well as feature a schedule planner or even a syllabus for each class.

The university will e-mail each student a message early this month reminding them about PantherProf evaluations with a link to the Web site. Simply go to the listed Web site and log in with your ePanther ID and password.

The goal of PantherProf each year is to have students submit surveys during finals week, giving students two weeks to fill out course surveys.

PantherProf improves with each student’s use and ideally “almost institutionalize(s) PantherProf to the point where it becomes commonplace at UWM,” Duncan said.

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