By ISAAC RAMOS
Come enlistment season, students would often have two tabs open on their browsers: one for CRS and one for “Profs to Pick,” previously named Rate UP Profs. In the toxic environment of UP and many other universities, use of the latter and forms of its likeness has been essential for students to make sure they are not putting themselves in the hands of terror profs or in classes where they are less likely to get high grades. Whether by way of screen or by mouth, students scramble to know which classes or professors to take their chances on or sidestep so they can decide.
Just recently, the Profs to Pick website closed down after receiving a cease-and-desist order from UP. Still, other forms have sprouted on sites like Facebook and Reddit, showing just how much this is something students cannot do without, and for good reason. The space that professor rating websites provide allows students to create a culture that satirizes the grading system they are set against. While full of remarks that constantly shift from reliable to dubious, valuable to flippant, these platforms have nonetheless proven seemingly indispensable because their appeal rests on providing users a semblance of control over a torrent of standards and ranks.
Helpfulness
It seems fitting to inscribe somewhere in its emblem: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” For indeed stepping into UP is like stepping into an inferno. Its many burdensome policies betray its prestigious edifice and take its toll on those on its scaffolds: its staff, faculty, and not least, its students for whom many different challenges lurk in the snake pit that is UP. Among said challenges is the much-feared encounter with a terror prof.
Terror professors are notorious for being problematic and unreasonable, making them unpopular choices for students. During enlistment, the slots available in their classes can well accommodate the overbooking of the others, except no one wants to be anxious every meeting. Platforms like Profs to Pick help students identify terror profs so that they can avoid them altogether and opt for those more approachable and understanding.
The premium put on avoidance says much is at stake for students here. The anxious lookout for terror profs is fuelled by a haunting awareness of the need to survive and to do so aggressively. The rapids whittling the whole apparatus of education have turned it into a worship of grades—the currency of survival in the economy of competition that molds the educational system and for which end it ultimately functions.
The mythic narrative built around grades makes numbers indicative of intellectual merit, ability, and competency. It is with these numbers that the system evaluates its students and it is these too that students satirize to rate their professors.
Easiness
The logic underlying the everyday classroom regimen privileges grades and fosters “grade-consciousness.” It intoxicates students with aggressive competition, as in the workplace that they are thrust into in the future. Both spaces are strangled by the clutches of capitalist ethics: the highest good is to compete well and to be on top.
This arena of cold numbers pushes students to take a more convenient choice. What space is supposed to be devoted to learning and critical discourse is turned into one of rankings and strata, the locus of development turned to one of stasis. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu says that the education system becomes a tool for maintaining social order. Replete with values that reflect those of the dominant class, this superstructure wanders far from its transformative potential.
The whole apparatus of education is made a tool for the reproduction of lopsided power relations. While hierarchical teacher-student relations are maintained, the ways of classification and evaluation employed function to reproduce a capitalist ethos and a culture with no vision of going beyond the grip of capital and its push for unfettered competition. The end in sight is no changed society but the same one clinging to its rotting foundations.
Pedagogy
The trickling down of a systemic fetish for hierarchy and competition to the educational system impedes the cultivation of criticality. With the dominant narrative portraying grades as tickets to success, students are pressed to be greatly competitive players while exchanging the complexities of learning for expedience. They are fashioned as though into automatons made servile to social reproduction. In the middle of the helplessness that systemic ills produce, students tread paths of subversion. But there is much to be done for the reaction to become radical.
While professor rating platforms react to an educational system indifferent to students’ woes, these mechanisms run the risk of becoming illusory in their democratizing efforts and, worse, reduced to mere spaces at the altar of competition. They ultimately become ways of circumvention. Although they are coping mechanisms of sorts, they limit the purview of students’ imaginations of resistance.
What years of fighting for academic rights have proven is that students’ power lies in their willingness to create an alternative to the system. But while it takes a protracted effort to attain that alternative, its creation can begin with students challenging the dynamics of the classroom: asserting the grades their efforts warrant and struggling against the prevailing feudal relations in the classroom. It is only beyond any semblance of control that students can claim their power: out of fervent struggle, and wherever else their imaginations of resistance come to. ●
Published in print in the Collegian’s October 9, 2019 issue with the title “Easy Uno.”
