As I understand consumer review systems, their primary purpose is to provide perspective customers an honest evaluation of a product: Hopefully for the business, the content provider and the customer, information that promotes a purchase. A dishonest system, one that has a response bias, will soon cause damage to all. A secondary benefit of reviews is feedback for the business and content providers to improve their products. Negative comments are especially helpful for this purpose. However, review systems are not designed to protect or support defective products. Somehow, the review system must weed out poor products, improve others, and enable customers to purchase the right product. Not an easy task. There are philosophies behind any review system. One is to maximize responses, usually by allowing quick and easy ratings with no comments. This encourages responses of all kinds. Another approach is to mandate written comments. This usually winds up with extremes, high praise and livid negatives, with fewer in-the-middle comments. The bias of this system is toward the positive. Amazon.com maximizes ratings, supporting customer input but also allowing them to cheat the system with bogus reviews, both positive and negative. A few of my books, for example, received obvious troll one-star reviews with no recourse to remove them. I don’t believe the argument that ratings without comments are a disservice to instructors will work. The ratings are for prospective students. And they work as intended. My suggestion is for the insides of the rating system to be shared with instructors so that a more informed discussion could be held. Perhaps the details must be confidential so it cannot be gamed; yet instructor concerns deserve a more open and informed discussion. Maybe together we can create a stunningly effective system.
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