Picking a class schedule can be particularly stressful time for students. Students have to meet all their requirements, make sure classes don’t have a time conflict or fill up before they can get a spot and for many, one of the most important considerations in choosing a class is the professor.
No one wants a professor who is notoriously difficult, inconsistent, or boring. So how does one know? Certainly you can ask around or just pick arbitrarily and hope. Or you can do what more and more students are choosing to do and turn to the internet.
RateMyProfessors.com is a web site that was founded in 1999 by a Californian software engineer. The site has since been purchased by MTVu and subsequently expanded, now containing more than ten million ratings for countless professors at collegiate level institutions across the nation.
The site, as the name would imply, provides an arena to rate and evaluate professors. There are a couple different options: a 1-5 scale for ‘easiness, helpfulness, clarity, interest level prior to attending class, and text book use,’ and of course an option to rate based on appearance. There is also a comment box to write freely and add any additional comments. The total number you enter for each option on the scale is averaged and used to create an ‘overall quality’ score.
The site sounds easy enough: you log on, enter your college, and an alphabetical list of professors appear. Type in “University of Southern Maine Portland” and a list of 655 different professors pops up. Crista Getchell, a third year business major, says she uses RateMyProfessor every time she signs up for classes. “I figure if a lot of people don’t like a professor, I probably won’t either,” she said.
This generalization is what many students bank on. But how accurate is the site? One of the criticisms that RateMyProfessor and similar websites—created for the purpose of subjective evaluation—is that what makes a professor “good” in one student’s eyes may not always translate for another student. “Good” on RateMyProfessor can at times seem to be the equivalent of “this professor is easy.”
The comment boxes are often an arena to rail against professors since the website promises complete anonymity. The negative ratings are rarely constructive and instead seem to consist more of entries like, “it really sucks that he is the only person that teaches this class,” and “he is CRAZY.”
RateMyProfessor.com is, on one hand, a site that allows people to exercise the passive-aggressive voice that the internet tends to provide for society. Though it is comprehensive, it is also highly subjective and therefore never a fool-proof way to choose a professor. As Prof. Erika Anderson said, “This is a self-selected sample… Thus, it has to be taken with a grain of salt.”
Anderson, a professor in the Communications Department received the highest overall rating with a score of 4.6 while Donald Sytsma, professor of psychology, received the lowest with an overall rating of 1.6 in a comparison of professors who recieved more than 50 votes. Anderson was also rated as the ‘hottest’ professor. Anderson said she doesn’t check the website regularly and was unaware of her own existence on the site until a student told her about it. Sytsma did not respond to a request for comment.
Anderson says her ratings on RateMyProfessor are congruent with the positive student teacher evaluations that she receives at the end of each semester. The reason for these types responses? Anderson said she feels it is attributed to her attempt to have a “positive learning environment, fairness and open-mindedness in the classroom, and remaining student-centered.” The comments on RateMyProfessor.com seem to reflect this, with one student writing that Anderson is “extremely understanding and approachable.”
RateMyProfessor.com may not be foolproof if you use it to select your professor, but it does provide a forum for students to share their experiences and opinions regarding classes and teachers. The comment-box style allows more room for feedback than does the fill-in-the-bubble type questions on the teacher evaluations passed out in the classroom.
The site, like many on the internet, can be beneficial when the user remembers to take the advice of reviewers with a grain of salt.