Sacramento State joined universities nationwide last month in the PickAProf.com professor rating system, a website with the unique feature of displaying bar graphs tallying the professor grades given out and taken directly from the university records.

Karen Bratt, director of University Relations for Pick-A-Prof, said information provided by the website is informational and positive.

“We post as much information as we can to give the students a fuller picture so they know what the classes are about,” Bratt said.

The website gives students background information on the students who have left reviews, Bratt said.

Students can register with the website and gain full access to upload and read reviews through social networking website Facebook.com. Viewing professors is just a matter of inputting names into the search icon and clicking on a professor on the generated list. The website provides several options under each professor, including a grading history as well as feedback on the professor.

“The majority of our reviews are rating the professors as excellent,” Bratt said.

The website started collecting grade histories from select universities in 2000. In 2001, the website asked for information from UC Davis. The university complied at first, but later decided not to cooperate with the website.

According to university documentation obtained from Davis Information Practices Coordinator Lynette Temple, there were student privacy issues and there was a possibility that the information might be misused to distort the decisions students make about which courses to register for.

As a result, Pick-A-Prof filed a lawsuit with Yolo Superior Court against Davis in January of this year, claiming that grading histories should be made public record.

In 2004 the Associated Students of Davis passed a resolution allowing websites like Pick-A-Prof to act as an information system for faculty review for Davis students.

“We concluded, that with a few limitations on their request, we could probably resolve the student privacy issues,” said Christopher Patti, who served as the Davis counselor for the Office of the General Counsel in the lawsuit.

Patti said there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that the problems would actually occur. On that basis, Davis wouldn’t have been successful in attempting to resist disclosure of the information in litigation.

Sac State was recently added to the website’s directory and is already generating input from students.

President Alexander Gonzalez was indifferent about Sac State being added to the catalogue on the website.

“Whether we have an opinion (in giving out grade records) isn’t going to make a difference ultimately,” Gonzalez said in an interview with editors of The State Hornet. “If the courts decide that’s something they want to impose then that’s the way it’s going to work.”

Gonzalez said it was inevitable that a website like Pick-A-Prof was bound to start.

“If there’s a market out there, somebody’s going to exploit it,” Gonzalez said. “And that’s definitely one of them.”

In addition to giving students the ability to view grade histories, the website offers online class schedules as well as a way to trade and buy text books with other students. The website plans to expand on its system by including note sharing capabilities and the ability to see who else is planning on taking the course of interest. The expansion is going to be called course casting which, Bratt explains, is going to encourage professors to become more involved with the website in uploading notes to be used via podcasts with iPods.

The current numbers of school grade histories total approximately 150. Davis is the only UC on the website. Along with Sac State, CSU Fresno and San Diego State and San Francisco State are the only state universities represented in California.

Josh Staab can be reached at [email protected]