The online place to rate your instructor
By Blaine Huberty
Published February 2010
With the start of the spring 2010 semester, students will be returning to Metropolitan State University and once again readjusting their schedules based on their class load. Some may be in for a rude awakening when they discover instructors who assign large group projects and other work that simply won’t mesh with their family or work responsibilities. Sometimes students must quickly change their plans to drop classes, add new ones, get refunds for tuition or possibly see their planned graduation date pushed back.
’t it be nice to be able to read reviews of your potential instructors and have a clue what you might be dealing with before wasting money on a dropped class? Such a tool exists www.ratemyprofessor.com. The questions is, just how useful is the information on the site?
Started in May 1999 by John Swapceinski, www.ratemyprofessor.com is a review site, and was originally named TeacherRatings.com before being changed to RMP in 2001. The site was sold to Patrick Nagle and William DeSantis in November 2005, and sold again in January 2007 to MTVu, a part of MTV Network. RMP has over 6,000 schools, a million professors, and 10 million reviews, according to its home page.
Professors are listed alphabetically, along with their department, number of ratings, overall quality and ease. Users rate their instructor and course on a one-to-five scale, in five categories: ease, helpfulness, clarity, rater’s interest and an optional rating to determine if the instructor is attractive, “hot,” or not.
The end result is an overall rating (which does not take into account the ease rating) from one to five, characterized by a yellow smiley face for “good,” a green smiley face for “average” and a blue sad face for “poor.” Professors rated as “hot” have a red chili-pepper icon as well. Reviewers can also submit a short comment.
One of the site’s designers, who went on to create the K-12 version, www.ratemyteachers.com, says, “All we’re doing is taking chatter that may be in the lunchroom or the dorm room and organizing it so it can be used by students.” So, how useful is that chatter?
It depends. The content is user-submitted, so there is no guarantee that you can find your school, campus, major or even your instructor until you or someone submits content. The users are anonymous, so there is no way of knowing who is writing the reviews, raising many questions about the validity of the reviews. To start with, did the reviewer even go to the class they are reviewing? There is no way to be sure.
A teacher with a high number of poor reviews might be the victim of a smear campaign organized by a disgruntled student with assistance from friends who don’t even attend that institution. Likewise, there is nothing to stop one reviewer from writing multiple reviews about the same professor.
Is a poor review an example of a grudge against an instructor by an angry student? What are the circumstances surrounding a negative comment? One reviewer criticizes his instructor at Normandale after she almost fails him for cheating, but there is no proof that either he was cheating or that she was mistaken. The reader is left to wonder what the full story is.
The reviews are subjective and based on limited information. Instructors interviewed in other articles have stated there is a difference between students who like a subject and those who have to take the class as a requirement. Also, how easy, helpful, clear and interesting a topic is not the only criteria by which a teacher should be graded.
Since people who feel neutral about something are unlikely to bother writing a review, it’s highly probable that the reviews will be on one end of the spectrum or the other. Professors are allowed to rebut, but rebuttals seem few among the schools, campuses, majors and instructors researched. In the end, is www.ratemyprofessor.com worth a mouse click and a few minutes of your time? That will depend?n how much you choose to trust the reviewers.