PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MELISSA O'NEIL/Arizona Daily Wildcat Chad Schneider, a marketing and business management senior, votes for his least and most favorite professors online at www.professorperformance.com. The Web site lets students rate their professors whenever they want.

Students who can't wait until the end of the semester to evaluate their instructors are now turning to online alternatives that allow them to get the job done.

Sites like ProfessorPerformance.com and Grade-It.com, both of which have UA links, enable students to go online to evaluate their teachers using the standard A through F grading scale and add other comments.

"I think such a Web site is actually a great idea," said Jennifer Bowers, a nutritional sciences lecturer who had two positive evaluations posted on ProfessorPerformance.com.

"I know that when I was a student, I would have really found such a Web site interesting and useful," she said. "Although, as a faculty member, I would love to know who posted my evaluations."

Even poor evaluations have been welcomed. Meredith Aronson, a materials science and engineering professor, took her negative posting on ProfessorPerformance.com in stride.

"The course I teach is probably more demanding than any other course my students have had up to this point," Aronson said. "I think it's great that they have a place to go and voice their opinions."

Anonymous postings, which protect students from backlash, are legal, according to the founder and president of ProfessorPerformance.com, based in Mesa.

"A Web site such as ours is protected under free speech in the Constitution," said Kasey Kerber, 26, a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Jim Mitchell, who teaches the journalism department's "Law of the Press" class, agreed.

"Opinions get a lot of latitude under the law," Mitchell said. "Students are entitled to their opinion."

Kerber said the idea for ProfessorPerformance.com spawned from his personal frustration as a student. He earned his bachelor's degree in journalism in 1999 and a master's in education in 2001.

"I had an absolutely horrible class when I started my graduate work. Words could not describe this class," he said. "If I had known this professor was a bad professor, I could have taken another section of the class."

His original idea only involved setting up an online bulletin board, but two computer-engineer friends helped him design a full database-driven Web site instead.

Of the two evaluation Web sites, Grade-It.com is more comprehensive, while ProfessorPerformance.com is more colorful, with numerous activities besides evaluations.

Grade-It.com is organized by course and offers a section for professor comments. Students evaluate the course itself, including information about their teacher.

The site also asks specific information about the students, such as their grades, how many hours per week they worked on the course outside of class and what year they are in school.

ProfessorPerformance.com allows students to post an A through F grade in four general categories and then click on prewritten, standard comments that apply to the teacher. There is additional room at the bottom for the students' own comments.

"I have mixed feelings," said Theodore Gerber, assistant sociology professor, who had a positive evaluation listed on ProfessorPerformance.com. "On the one hand, it's legitimate to give students a forum to evaluate professors. On the other hand, this type of self-selecting survey research may not be very representative."

It's flattering to have good ratings, but a teacher should not put too much emphasis on just one evaluation, whether positive or negative, he said.

"People with strong opinions one way or another are more likely to visit such a site," Gerber said.

Professor suggestions have helped shape ProfessorPerformance.com, beginning with changing its name from MyProfessorSucks.com, Kerber said. Features like the posting date, time stamp and filters to prevent abuses were all implemented based on professor suggestions.

The filters were especially important, considering the potential for defamatory statements to be published, he said.

"We have heard of professors getting into trouble, which is kind of disturbing," Kerber said.

A Seton Hall University professor sent a derogatory mass e-mail to her students after reading 20 to 30 negative comments about herself on the site, he said. The teacher was later dismissed by her school and has been removed from his Web site's database.

The action against the teacher, however, seemed rooted more in an unprofessional reaction to what she had read than in the evaluations themselves, he added.

Kerber and his staff discourage official action being taken against professors with negative feedback, he said. An entire page of the site addresses the issue.

For her part, Aronson prefers a proactive approach. Knowing how difficult her engineering class is, she administers a mid-semester evaluation to find out about problems while she has a chance to fix them.

"When my students voice grievances, I address them," she said. "It's fine if they also want to use the Internet to do that. I don't have a problem with it."