A week and a half after the Web site Pick-A-Prof.com started charging OU students $5 a semester, the site designed to provide students with a forum for ranking and informing others about professors changed its mind.
That came after a few choice words from Clarke Stroud, vice president of Student Affairs, and UOSA leaders.
Stroud told The Daily that Pick-A-Prof had not informed him they were instituting the fee, which reportedly was done to cover increasing costs of maintaining the OU database.
But, according to Stroud, the reason the costs needed to be covered was that Pick-A-Prof had failed to send OU an invoice of payment for two years.
Way to go, Web site. How is someone supposed to pay you when you don't provide notice?
Karen Bragg, Pick-A-Prof director of university relations, gave students more good news when she announced that those who had already paid for service would be reimbursed.
We always find it thoroughly obnoxious when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. In this instance, it is even more ridiculous that a Web site that relies upon OU as a customer couldn't get its ducks in a row contract-wise.
Students seem to enjoy using Pick-A-Prof, and professors looking to boost their own egos or find a good laugh certainly sometimes check it out, too.
So this week, Stroud and UOSA leaders made the right move in pressuring the site to reverse its policy change. The entire purpose of signing a contract with such as site as Pick-A-Prof is to provide students with an extra service.
In The Daily's online poll Tuesday, 61.9 percent of responders said they wouldn't use the site if it were not free (although 29.2 percent said they don't use it now.)
The point, we think, is that fewer students would have used Pick-A-Prof were it to require a fee, and ultimately that would defeat the purpose of having a contract with the company.
If fewer people participated, the benefit of using the site would shrink and eventually the value of having a contract at all would disappear.
But, apparently, Pick-A-Prof didn't think about that before deciding to implement the fee.
Fortunately, Stroud and UOSA leaders did.
hello there & you too
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