Students Use Website to Select Their Professors
At RateMyProfessor.com, students grade professors
D.A. Mangan
Issue date: 4/6/05 Section: The Faculty
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 Media Credit: RateMyProfessors.com An official banner of RateMyProfessor.com |
One option growing in popularity with the web is RateMyProfessors.com, where you can look at over 3 million student comments and ratings of 524, 463 professors at 4,485 higher education institutions in both the U.S. and Canada.
RateMyProfessors.com is a website "Where the students do the grading." Any student, free of cost and without signing up for an account, may look up his or her higher education institution to view and post ratings of specific professors.
According to an an article in the March edition of Spinnaker, the University of Northern Florida's online student newspaper, the website was founded in 1999 by John Swapceinski, who graduated in the same year from San Jose State University. Swapceinski told Spinnaker, "I got the idea for the site after taking a class with a particularly dastardly professor who often left students in tears and genuinely seemed to enjoy it."
Students posting ratings are given a 1 to 5 scale (5 being the best) to rate in categories such as "easiness," "helpfulness," "hotness," "clarity," and interest in the topic before taking the course. However, the only two categories that are used to calculate a professor's average are "helpfulness" and "clarity"--the corresponding average is listed with the appropriate emoticon (a sad face, straight face, or smiley face). If a professor has a "hotness" score of 1 or above, a red tamale is featured next to their name.
 Media Credit: RateMyProfessors.com An official banner of RateMyProfessor.com |
Each school is assigned an administrator to enforce the rater guidelines. The administrator is a student of that institution who volunteered to become an employee of RateMyProfessor.com. His or her responsibilities on a daily basis include reviewing, accepting, and deleting ratings as well as correcting any erroneous information (such as the spelling of a professor's name).
While there is a person to enforce the rules, there still exist comments about professors that do not adhere to the rater guidelines. For instance, one SUNY Albany professor received these comments, "WORST class I ever took. (Professor's name) is a wack job," as well as "zzZzz," and "He ruined my life and I am sure quite a few others." As a student looking for input on what kind of professor or class this is, you may have a clear idea of a particular rater's feelings, but not a clue as to their origin; these are strong comments but yield little information about teaching style or the course material.
In addition to wondering how constructive some rater comments may be, other parts of the site may leave you puzzled. For instance, the site has created a list of "funniest ratings." When listing the purpose of RateMyProfessor.com, the site explains that it is a resource for students and "When you have the option of choosing a teacher, wouldn't you really like some information?" as well as "It gives you a place to make a difference in your education." The purpose statement of the site, in combination with the rater guidelines may make a list of funniest ratings confusing. Some samples from the list are, "Three of my friends got A's in his class and my friends are dumb," "BORING! But I learned there are 137 tiles on the ceiling," and "She hates you already."
However, the website does suggest scrutiny. "It is not possible for us to verify which raters had which teachers, so always take the ratings with a grain of salt. Remember, we have no way of knowing who is doing the rating--students, the teacher, other teachers, parents, dogs, cats, etc."
 Media Credit: RateMyProfessor.com An official banner of RateMyProfessor.com |
Another non-rating related perk the website offers is a forum where students and educators create topics and discuss them. One professor expressed his or her feelings in a post labeled "Returning Rotten Papers" where he or she wrote, "I just feel awful about it" and "Just thought students on this forum might be interested in knowing that profs. hurt too when results suck." Other forum topics have included professor's feelings about the "hot" category as well as thoughts on the Terri Schiavo case.
And yes, professors use this site too! However, being that they are the focus of the website, their perceptions of it may differ from that of students. In James Madison University's student newspaper The Breeze, Swapceinski reported that two-thirds of the professors he hears from hate the site. Spinnaker magazine reports that Swapceinski receives threats of legal action from professors every week. He told Spinnaker, "It's amazing the number of professors with Ph.D.s that don't get the concept of the First Amendment."
What are perceptions of the site at the University at Albany? Professor William Rainbolt of the Journalism department said the site is useful "if students actually give evidence for their opinions so that a reader can judge for himself or herself." Rainbolt said he knew of an instance in which students decided to "gang up" on a professor simply because he or she enforced an attendance policy.
Edwina Smith, a graduating senior at Albany, feels this site is an outlet, she said, "The students don't necessarily have a way to express themselves, but this website gives them that opportunity." Nicholas Fahrenkopf is a freshman at Albany, and had found RateMyProfessors.com through another college website. He found that the profesesors he had difficulty with and those that were helpful were rated on the site accordingly. Fahrenkopf said. "With this resource in hand I selected professors that had good reviews for my second semester classes, and now I have all classes that I can really learn in."
Perhaps RateMyProfessor.com can give you a hand in choosing your professors in the following weeks. Check it out.