Great, My Professor

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By JJ HERMES

Partly because he was fed up with the childish comments on Web sites where students rate their professors, a Temple University business professor has created an online forum for students who want to sound off. So as not to mislead anyone, the site's title suggests its intent: Thank You Professor.

"There are so many vehicles for students to express their opinion," says the site's creator, Samuel D. Hodge Jr., chairman of the business school's legal-studies department. "But there's nothing really at the school where the professor can get a letter directly from the student."

When the site went live on May 1, Mr. Hodge says, he expected about a dozen comments in the first week. Instead, more than 200 flooded in. He converts each note into a letter to the faculty member being praised and copies it to the dean.

Mr. Hodge moderates the comments, but so far there haven't been any negative posts on the site (http://sbm.temple.edu/thankyou/notes).

For example, the four "thank-you notes" that have been left for Rob B. Drennan Jr., an associate professor of risk, insurance, and health-care management, are uniformly laudatory. "I truly enjoyed his class," wrote one student. "Difficult and challenging, but isn't that what we want from school?" Contrast that to a prominent comment concerning Mr. Drennan on RateMyProfessors.com, left by a student last spring: "BOOOOO!!!!!"

Mr. Hodge says that Ohio State University is the only other institution he knows of that gives students a way to thank their professors on the Web.

Temple's teaching and learning center may extend its site to the whole university, he says: "It's such positive reinforcement."