One of every student's biggest fears on any college campus is having a teacher or professor who isn't very good at or doesn't care about their interactions with their students.

Nowadays, choosing the right teacher is almost as important as picking the right class.

Until recently, students at Penn State haven't had many options when it came to deciding which teacher to pick for a course.

VirtualRatings.com (www.virtualratings.com), a Web site that gives users a chance to rate everything from entertainment to government to transportation, now allows students to rate their professors at selected universities, including Penn State's University Park campus.

As the Web site has been gaining popularity, some Penn State students have even received e-mails asking for their input on professors, classes and campus life.

As of today, 15 Penn State instructors have been graded on their performances on the Web site. The current grades range from Ds to A++s, with comments included, such as "Enthusiastic French Professor!"

However, while the Web site is a good idea, it hardly serves much of a purpose for a campus with over 40,000 students.

Considering the abundance of professors we have on this campus, having only 15 of them evaluated doesn't help the vast majority of students who might never encounter these specific professors inside the classroom.

And, if and when more teachers are added to the Web site's database in the future, the opinions of one or two students should not be used as the definitive sample of all the students at the University Park campus.

Although online ratings are available, a better way for students to gauge their professors would be to publish their SRTEs (Student Rating of Teaching Effectiveness).

Public access of SRTEs, the end-of-semester evaluations handed out in class, would allow prospective students to more clearly see how previous classes have felt about a professor's performance.

Publishing the SRTEs, whether in an digital forum or print publication, would be the most comprehensive and statistically accurate rating guide for faculty members at Penn State. Students deserve to know what kind of professor they are going to have and make sure they're getting their money's worth.