TeacherReviews.com Forced Offline 664
MrCawfee writes "Dylan Greene's site Teacher Reviews which allows students to post reviews of their professors. The site was taken down because a professor complained about comments made against him, and threatened to sue. Here is an exerpt from his blog: 'Yesterday and tonight I talked with a professor who was extremely upset with what written about him on TeacherReviews. He had several inappropriate reviews that made unfounded accusations and inappropriate untruthful remarks such as calling him "Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic."' You can read his blog here."
Problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need to delete all the site (Score:3, Insightful)
All you need for anon posting is to log the IP (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, you've got to stand behind what you write, even online.
Re:Ebay precedent? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good precedent but as the poster stated - he doesn't have the time/resources to put on a legal defense. No matter how good the previous rulings are, you still need legal counsel.
MOD THIS +5 FUNNY (Score:1, Insightful)
though the first amendment somehow means something
and we should do something accordingly.
Chilling effect (Score:5, Insightful)
tomorrow is a president vs. editorial reviews.
Maybe donate to the ACLU [aclu.org] and EFF [eff.org]
to help them protect our freedom of speech online.
Cheers, Joel
Re:Problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone else notice... (Score:3, Insightful)
Matt Fahrenbacher
Exactly the wrong response. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, this professor has forced a valuable tool off-line, thereby preventing other prospective students from finding out about difficult/unreasonable professors or classes they choose to avoid. Many of these professors *shouldn't* be teaching any more, and if enough students learn to avoid their classes, maybe it will help that school with some positive change.
Sadly, this seemingly paranoid and thin-skinned professor (oops, maybe he'll threaten to sue me now!) makes a huge deal out of a negative review, and now further entrenches the 'false' reputation he feels he doesn't deserve.
Re:Problem is... (Score:3, Insightful)
To say someone is schizophrenic when you are not an expert in the field is libelous, in any case.
Re:1st Amendment? (Score:1, Insightful)
It's in context as a general insult against the professor's pesonality. I don't see how that fails to qualify as an opinion.
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Polyratings (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RateMyProfessors (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's an example:
Fred Phelps is a "Baptist Preacher" in Topeka, Kansas who pickets funerals of people who die from aids with signs that say "God hates fags", etc.
Now, I personally think he's a fuck-nut and is clearly psycho. Can he sue me for saying this? Not in a million years.
Re:making student evaluations public (Score:4, Insightful)
Students badger other students. Professors have been known to badget other professors. And how many stories are there of professors who badger students? It's not surprising that there are students who do the same to professors. I'm not saying of the above is warranted or real (ie, it might just be paranoia). Of course, your case seems to prove that it's at least real.
The fact is, freedom of speech has been known to do a lot worse than ruin careers. Just think of the number of minorities or woman who have been physically assaulted or worse because of unfounded allegations. The simple fact is, there's very little that can be done about the speech itself because even removing this one site won't stop the word of mouth or a newsletter someone writes or the next blog someone starts. The only people you should really worry about is those in power to ruin your career or those around you who can do personal damage. The way of resolving that is to talk to them. While you're at it, maybe you can try a little harder to gain the respect of your students. You can't force people to think one way about you, but you can try your best to personally impress upon those people you think matter what you're really like so that you can alleviate your fears. There's no way elsewise to begin to solve the problem.
Re:Problem is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Iv'e had professors like this (that even fit my prior description); even the staff knew they were off their rocker. Luckily, they were all reasonable people (for the most part), and they were even brilliant--even though they were loonier than a pair of Mexican jumping beans on a hot tin roof. I would have appreciated knowing this beforehand, and probably would have taken the courses with those professors anyway.
If this guy really is a nutball, or even eccentric, then people should know it.
Of course, I can't have had any experience with this nutjob of a professor. Likewise, neither could the operator of a teacher review site have enough experience with the thousands of professors nationwide to say anything positive or negative about any given professor.
Obviously, there needs to be an accountability system, whereby the person whom entered the review can be tracked. Or something. I dunno.
Re:Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
If a teacher is rated highly by students for handing out A's without teaching much, and I actually want to learn the subject, I don't want that teacher. The numbers aren't always enough.
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, let me get this straight...
The professor threatened to sue, even after removal of the offensive posts, because someone called him paranoid?
Umm... Gee, Tweaky, you might want to lighten up on the coffee. That "paranoid" idea sounds all too appropriate... Most people would have brushed it off as a crack by some waste of flesh that couldn't pass the class, but no, Tweaky here had to have a valuable internet resource taken down.
If that doesn't count as paranoid...
Re:How'd you like to reverse the roles? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called "grades."
aye that's libel (Score:2, Insightful)
Well the teacher's right. Unless one can prove that they have been diagnosed as that and that its applicable to what they were saying then its libel and yes as a publisher you could be sued for libel.
People often make the mistake that they have freedom to say whatever they want and that's just not the case at all, those rights have to do with government interference not personal.
I don't agree (Score:2, Insightful)
Who would moderate? The professor?
Your entire argument boils down to this:
"If bad words get around about my teaching, I could be ruined".
Well. Yeah. Isn't that kind of the point? Well, not really, but as a professor, you are selling your ability to teach to student. If you suck at teaching, then a student should know that and be able to avoid you.
Teachers resist this kind of feedback because they refuse to acknowledge their first responsibility is to their students.
It would be refreshing if a professor created his own blog/rating system where students could rate him, and then he could respond if he wanted to comments.
Everybody would understand that a comment of "You suck" is a joke. But a comment of "The professor was consistenly 15 minutes late for class, his tests covered material that I'd never seen, and his attitude towards his students was awful. I don't recommend him/her". This is legit. This should be viewed for all the world to see. And if a professor isn't willing to be held up to scrutiny for students paying $10's of thousand per year, then maybe he/she should find another line of work.
Re:Schools (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:1st Amendment? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How'd you like to reverse the roles? (Score:3, Insightful)
I am a teacher (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:well (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
Well then, the responsibility lies with the reader to look at the information for what it really is: a collection of opinions without full context, rather than a factual, discrete rating of the instructor.
It would actually be pretty neat if we could standardize the instructor review systems in a manner similar to amazon's book reviews... when you're rating the professor, you could submit a verbal review (anonymously, of course). Later, the students of that professor could read the reviews, and meta-moderate them by indicating how relevant and/or accurate each review was. The reviews presented publicly would then present real contextual information, as well as being accountable.
Re:Schools (Score:1, Insightful)
Plus, some professors are just
In my experience, "challenging" is either a bad professor or a professor who doesn't know when to quit. Either way, I don't want to take a class from them, and I'm rather appalled that they're employed in such a profession at all.
Re:Schools (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Travesty (Score:3, Insightful)
As an executive manager myself, feedback is absolutely critical to personal and professional improvement. Managers who do not listen to the folks they manage are often have very short and exlosively misguided careers. Often the personnel themselves are significantly more experienced or more recently experienced in the field that one manages, so to ignore them is to make a constant slew of inevitable mistakes. Managers and execs MUST take into account the opinions of their folks to achieve success.
In the same vein, teachers are managers of students and the learning process. These teachers must have an avenue for feedback (even if students only feel comfortable commenting in annonymous web-based environments such as TeacherReviews) to improve. To deny students and teachers themselves this feedback, is to admit that you are unwilling to improve.
In regards to the few blatant examples of potentially undeserved negative feedback, anyone with a little backbone and self-confidence should be able to see through these. Ignore the few so as not to invalidate the mass.
Within these terms, notification of the professors that comments have been written on them is potentially an extremely valuable addition to the site. The limiting factors that the site author proposes should be dropped out of hand as they limit the value of the vast majority of content, but the lack of quality in a few posts.
Bottom line, put the site back up. You are providing an invaluable tool to both students and teachers. The constitution and court precedence clearly protects you (as delineated by other posts) so any suit should be thrown out in the preliminary stages. Teachers should (and hopefully do) applaud your efforts, not resort to whining to the 'principal' when they get called a bad name.
Re:Schools (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, from my experience most teachers that don't teach and hand out A's don't get high marks from the students. By the time students reach college most students really want to get the education they paid for. The students that just want to skate are in the minority by college. When someone chooses a major and decides what they want to do for a living, they expect good teachers.
Guess he'll become even more popular now (Score:3, Insightful)
This slashdot publicity should really help him regain his reputation !
Re:Article lists wrong reason for shutdown (Score:1, Insightful)
You trash everyone's rights when you refuse to stand up to even the most mundane challenge. He caved before the first hearing. That is his choice, legally, but he actually had a moral obligation not to cave in.
One reason it sucks to be an American: You are supposed to have a sense of duty and patriotism, and you are supposed to be driven to stand up for right and wrong, regardless of the personal costs to you, even if it means forfeiting your life.
If you think that bounden duty sucks, the consequences of us NOT doing so are going to such MUCH worse.
Mark my words.
Anecdote (Score:2, Insightful)
The student wrote an inflammatory letter about the teacher to my friend's superior . His superior agreed on a meeting with the student where he basically told the student - "The point of this class was to teach persuasive writing, and after reading your letter I would tend to agree with your teachers evaluation."
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)
HOWEVER, as to the "material they develop on the university's dime is their own property," I'm definitely going to have to disagree with you here. What do you consider to be "on the university's dime"? What do you consider "material"? If they make up course notes for a course that they're teaching, I think that they own them, and that students don't have an absolute right to possess them. I also think that if a prof writes a book, they should get the profits from it.
You may not realise this, but most profs are still active in their field, and tend to publish a few papers every year; are you really saying that the University should own these papers, and not the profs, simply because they're employed? /. had a discussion about this a couple days ago about IP and programmers; why is it different for professors (or any of the "intelligencia")?
Re:Schools (Score:2, Insightful)
There are many questions covering the different areas that make a class good -- teacher, materials,etc.
One of the questions is:
Did you feel the class was too challenging?
[] Strongly Agree
[] Somewhat Agree
[] Strongly Disagree
There is even an opportunity to write page long piece on anything you want.
This is what should be published. If one student trashes a teacher it shouldn't matter too much if a median average scoring method is used.
Re:Um, How does Slashdot handle this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Paranoid and Schitzophrenic.... not yet! (Score:5, Insightful)
On a separate note, I'm a 3rd year university student. I think anyone can attest that they've had good & bad professors.
I think this site may well be valuable to students. This site is certainly prone to slandering. I would have loved to have read reviews of teachers before taking a class. In university you don't always know students who'd taken a class. It's easy to miss a class from a good professor and equally easy to sign up with a bad professor. I think some amount of review should be made of the reviews and perhaps proof of enrollment. I don't advocate censorship but this would at least remove slanderous or untrue accounts.
Admittedly, determining what qualities make a good or bad professor is subjective. On the other hand, universities should be more forthcoming about the results of teacher reviews. They discard the reviews as if they never happened. Students cannot find out from the faculty or administration which teachers are performing well and which are not.
Thoughts on Alternatives. (Score:5, Insightful)
And by default, you can see the review of the item that is most relevant.
How can this not apply to Teacher Reviews? If a review of the teacher is particularly bad, but gets voted as useful / accurate, then oh well.
Maybe reviews should be blammed Newgrounds Style [newgrounds.com], but with a few modifications. After a certain number of votes, if the review is found slanderous / not useful, it becomes invisible and flagged for review.
Also, why not instead of censor it, allow the actual teacher room to respond to his / her own review? If there are 200 upvotes on a negative review of the teacher, the teacher should have the right to defend his / her own philosophy.
Apparently this fellow doesn't care for his work *too* much. If he fought the good fight, I'm sure the ACLU et al would help foot the bill.
Thoughts? (I'd prefer responses over moderation on this one)
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:4, Insightful)
How about starting RateTheStudents.com ? Would you like being publicly called a cheat or an incompetent lazy weasel (for good reason or not)? Would you like the profs to consult such a site before they start marking the final exam? I thought not.
Yes, that prof might have overreacted, but there's only that much abuse anyone can take. Who knows what else is going on in his life/job, maybe that was the last straw.
F***ed Company (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Schools (Score:4, Insightful)
> All they have to do is take the end-of-course data that they share with the professor, and publish it.
Right. That's "all they would have to do", but they don't, which is why sites like TeacherReviews.com came to be. As a former student, it was nice to know which profs were hard-asses and which were not. The fact that this guy is threatening to sue this site just reinforces how much of an asshole he/she is. I'm sure there was a reason several people posted negative comments.
Re:I am a teacher (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Schools (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:2, Insightful)
When I was in college we had to actually TALK to other people that shared our major.
None of this forums stuff!
We had to seek out people that had gone before us! We talked to real people and asked real questions!
It was hard, and we LIKED it that way!
PS... I think I might have actually learned something at the same time.
Re:Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
Your random pick turned out a poor example:
Course: Honors Calculus II, section xxx
Your random selection turned up a rank-and-file class that is selectively taken above-average students. You are going to pick up almost exclusively outliers of the desired population.
The workload for this course was (5=LIGHT...1=HEAVY) 2.81 C
Either the students are definitely outliers and think several hours of homework a night isn't bad or the professor was easy going. Calc II is usually a course covering methods and applications of integration. It's the course when such fun things as integration by partial fraction decomposition - an almost universally hated subject - are explored. Getting the hang of integration generally requires doing lots and lots of integrals and appropriately the course workload should be fairly high.
My expected grade in this course is (5=A...1=E) 4.21 A-
Wow! Do A's grow on trees at umich?
Students typically give evaluations whose numbers directly correspond to their grade. Professors who give out A's like they're cheap hard candy on average receive higher marks even if their students tend to learn less.
This is particularly true of general ed. classes. I'd rather take a humanities course from someone who is an interesting lecturer and gives out high marks cheaply than from someone who is an interesting lecturer but requires 5,000 words of critical thinking essays which require mastery of the material to write.
While I think it is interesting to hear the professor's passion for the subject, I have a lot of other courses in line with my major that I need to give the bulk of my attention to. I'd rather not risk my GPA on a humanities course. I enter notes into the school's unofficial professor rating web site whether or not a particular professor is good for getting an easy A in.
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the intent of the website creator, in taking down the site, is a good-faith effort to make it a little less abusive. Personally, I disagree with his decision to allow profs to make reviews private; instead, I think it would be better to have a feature allowing a prof's response to a particular review.
Funny how a lot of things all boil down to similar principles, isn't it? How to balance the rights & the privacy of the many against the evil intentions of the few?
Re:Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't exactly random; I just tried to pick a course with a good mix of questions and responses. Each department uses their own set of questions, and some only have a few basic ones. The math department was the first one I clicked on. tried to find a section with a variety of marks, this was the first one I found after 2 or 3 tries. I wasn't trying to make a point with the actual data - just trying to show what information was provided.
Wow! Do A's grow on trees at umich? Well, generally speaking students in this class are way above average in math (generally there are a few hundred taking the 'regular' Calc II class, and about 40 students total took the honors class). Also, this is the estimated grade, so in this case I think it's a class of freshman that haven't found out that they won't get straight A's in college (for the most part). From experience, I can tell you A's don't exist at umich, especially in the math department... :-/ The actual average grade in the honors section was about a 3.3(B+), while in the 'regular' sections of calc 2, the average grade was about a 2.7(C+)
Either the students are definitely outliers and think several hours of homework a night isn't bad or the professor was easy going.
Students typically give evaluations whose numbers directly correspond to their grade. Professors who give out A's like they're cheap hard candy on average receive higher marks even if their students tend to learn less. Well yeah, of course they do. That's why the multiple ratings are helpful. If the average workload is a 5 (light), then chances are the prof got a good rating because of that. If the workload was a 3, then the prof ratings mean a lot more to me. If they just said "Math xxx section xxx with prof xxx got a 4.2 rating", that would mean nothing to me.
I do have a professor that always ranks very high on evaluations, yet assigns much more work than other profs do, and makes the classes a lot more difficult. He's a great prof, and the extra work actually translates into better understanding of the subject/doesn't assign work just for the sake of assigning work. Obviously this isn't always the case though.
Making decisions based solely on these ratings isn't a great idea - you can get a lot more insight by talking to other students that have taken classes in that section before. The course evals are a great place to start, and are a good source of advice if you don't know anyone who has had that professor before.
IAAP (Score:5, Insightful)
Courses and professors are not simply to be rated and "consumed" based on how pleased you are with your performance in a class. That's not to say professors shouldn't be evaluated, but rather, that student ratings shouldn't be the primary means of doing so. There is a conflict of interest inherent in student ratings: students who perform poorly, who are required to take a class, etc. tend to rate professors lower than individuals who perform well or who are taking the course as an elective. This has nothing to do with the professor--it has everything to do with a student blaming a professor for their own performance problems.
There is a disturbing trend among universities, possibly fading, possibly not, to strive toward a product-consumer model, where students are the consumers, and the university is the producer. A more appropriate model to aim for is one in which both students and professors are seen as producers, and the university community is the consumer, so to speak. Students should go to a university to contribute, not to consume. The same should be said for professors.
Having said all this, I don't in general have a problem with a website, forum, or whatever, publishing student ratings of courses. Students talk about classes anyway, and these sorts of things just open up the flow of communication. I also see plenty of colleagues who can't teach a damn, and should probably be forced to reconsider the abuse they give to students.
If a student really did post something about a professor being a "paranoid schizophrenic," fine, but then someone should be held liable for, well, libel, because it's not a label that should be taken lightly (whoa--that's some sort of inchoate tongue-twister). As other posts have noted, there ARE young professors trying to get tenure, whose lives ARE affected by disgruntled students with a GPA of
I hope this website stays running, but I also hope that whoever runs it realizes that they need to be responsible for the things that appear on their website. If they put this stuff up, fine, but they should be prepared for lawsuits surrounding exactly these sorts of things. I also think that whoever visits these sorts of sites thinks long and hard about why they are seeking out this information, and why they are seeking an education.
There have been suggestions of moderated ratings and that sort of thing. It's not such a bad idea. Perhaps appropriate moderations should be done in exactly the same way that universities and professors are asked to consider ratings? E.g., that ratings be weighted lower if they are coming from individuals with lower GPAs, lower grades in the class, or if they are not taking the course as an elective? There would be problems in this in a non-university site, because you would have no way of verifying grades, but ideally, this is the way it could be done. Allow other professors to moderate them? Who knows. I guess it could be done.
Query? (Score:4, Insightful)
True (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like the mom who gives her kid candy: "My mom is cool."
Yeah, but she's a lousy mom!
Re:Schools (Score:2, Insightful)
Come one, do you really believe that 18 year old students are mature enough to do that? Then you go to a very different university than I did! Maybe they could do that after a couple of years as students, but certainly not at first.
"Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic." (Score:3, Insightful)
As for Schitzophrenic that could possible be an exaggeration. But it sounds like he still needs to take a Chill Pill.
Re:Why is it bad for students to grade teachers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Note that I'm not talking about immunity for the people posting the comments, neccesarily - I'm talking about immunity for the people HOSTING the comments, which is where people attack.
I also think that you tend to over-estimate the credibility of an attack, particularly in a forum where the accused has an equal voice.
That said, I also don't have all that much against repealling or at least limiting our current libel and slander laws - truth should (of course) be an absoulte defense, plausible truch should be near-absolute, opinion rather than stated fact should have a very high burden of proof of both intent to and actual harm before the speech is even removed, much less damages awarded. The more free your speech, the more free your freedoms - there is no way that unrestricted speech can make people less free. Only restricted speech can do that.
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:2, Insightful)
What? Like a transcript?
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:1, Insightful)
Part of your educational experience ought to be learning how to deal with different teaching methods and the range of professors, from great to awful. A "I didn't like him" doesn't cut it in the real world, and it shouldn't in the classroom -- be it high school or college.
Word of mouth on campus rates professors and students, alike. So none of this is new, just "in print" so to speak.
Got real complaints about sexual harrassment or racism? Take it to the school, the dean, or whomever. Want to rate your professor's sexiness, complain about his political conservatism or liberalism, or whine about all those demanding assignments? Be professional and discreet, and a bit respectful, and do it word-of-mouth. Should you feel the burning need to rate your professor, then by all means, have at it. Just remember: correct spelling and proper grammar might give your review more authority.
Re:Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry but students are not the public figures that professors are. Often professors sign their name with their phd and the school they teach at to get extra clout in letters to the editor, the political process, are considered experts and testify in court, etc. Students have none of these powers of "celebrity."
A professor in social sciences can nominate anyone for a Nobel Peace Prize, can a student say the same?
In the end being a professor is a very, very public job and criticism of a public figure is nothing new, its just acadamia has yet to catch up with the real social changes the information revolution is bringing.
On top of this, professors are given web space by the universities they work for and can give a rebuttal that is easy to find with any search engine and it costs them nothing in hosting fees.
>Yes, that prof might have overreacted, but there's only that much abuse anyone can take
Then perhaps a job in the private sector is best for him. People make these lame apologies for politicians too. If its too hot in the kitchen...
Bwahahahah.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, part of being in the program is getting to take special honors classes that are pretty much limited to Chancelor's Scholars. Basically a variety of interesting classes covering some cool material in-depth. (Yes, I'm aware that's a fragment.)
One semester I took a shakespeare class that involved some peer reading/editing of papers. I am sad to report that only about 30% of the students in this class were capable of writing a simple essay with an introduction, body, conclusion, and complete sentences.
And we're talking about the top 2% of college students.
It's sad. Nobody can write anymore. It's perfectly possible to get through high school having never written a good paper and still get good grades because nobody makes you write essays anymore and even if they do, as long as your answers are right they don't really care about form.
And I think it's starting to have a negative impact in rather visible areas of our society - like journalism. I think journalists are getting incredibly dumb - because you don't need to be a decent journalist to write for a major publication anymore - anyone who can actually write complete sentences is so rare that they'll do.
Re:Speaking as a professor... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:what about book or software review sites? (Score:3, Insightful)
I typed in the subject for my post before I wrote it, so it doesn't completely represent what I was trying to get across. Teacher review sites can have some useful information, but because they're necessarily anonymous, you can't truly fully trust any of the ratings on an individual basis.
The same is true of Amazon. Taken together and interpreted as a whole, the reviews can be helpful in trying to gauge the quality or desirability of a product, but individually they're susceptible to bias and outright misinformation. Take Michael Moore's latest book, "Dude, Where's My Country? [amazon.com]". Look at some of the recent 1-star reviews (I've bolded things that appear to be personal attacks instead of useful advice):
- Michael Moore, here are a few words of advice: Take a shower, lose some weight, shave once in a while, and, most importantly, stop writing stupid books and making fallacious movies. To everyone else: For a better read, pick up something by someone who hasn't been brainwashed. And maybe listen to a Led Zep CD or something! Then watch the O'Reilly Factor and FoxNews. Just my advice
- Ignorance is bliss and that pretty much explains why this book sells. People believe anything that is published. No facts, pure bias and opinion. I read two chapters and sold the book on ebay. Obviously i'm not a pure unquestioned right-winger since I bought the book. I believe in facts and research, not opinion. The book pinpoints and streamlines the typical media bias, brainwashing and filtering of facts. If you are a braindead, DON'T-HAVE-MY-OWN-OPINION dopey liberal, you'll enjoy the book. If you want to waste your money go ahead, you have my blessings.
- This book is a liberals screaming cry for help. Founded on the communist manifesto, the author is highly skilled in spreading lies. The book is really a waste of time if you're looking for the truth. A better book would be," The Real Lincoln",or Webster's Dictionary.
Of course, there were 10 5-star reviews submitted the very day that book was released, so you can search for bias on the other side of the political spectrum as well. For example, "Bias [amazon.com]" received a 1-star review within a day or two of being published: "This book is full of (...), innuendo, and (...). There is just as much of a conservative bias in the media as there is a liberal bias. It just shows up in different places. Don't believe this poor analysis. The media may present a distorted veiw, but this book gets IT ALL WRONG. " There may be legitimate 5-star and 1-star reviews for books on Amazon, but it's difficult to take any of them seriously with crap like this.(One note about this: the first chapter of the book, whether right or wrong, is heavily researched and contains many, many footnotes that attribute statements to the published news articles they were drawn from.)
Admirably, Amazon does some things that teacher rating sites could pick up on - rating of reviews (i.e., "23 out of 30 people found this review helpful") and featured "Spotlight Reviewers", who put their names and reputations behind what they write. Unfortunately, the number of teachers and professors a person will have in their education is probably not as large as the number of books they'll read, so I don't know how useful those features would be with teacher ratings.
I guess I probably should have said "Anonymous reviews are untrustworthy and subject to unsupported opinions and personal attacks" instead of calling them completely worthless, but I feel they're about as useful as a slashdot poll - possibly interesting, somewhat amusing, but not much beyond that.