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ratemyprofessors.com


Mark Arbour

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That's the website. Ratemyprofessors.com. It's pretty surprising that this little resource actually works. I don't know if you've ever been there, but it's a place where "students" can go and rate their professors. They have categories in ease of the class, quality of the case, and a place for comments. They even have a chili pepper for "hot" professors.

 

Sounds great right? Well, it's funny how absolutely despised this site is by Academia, meaning the professors. And it's not even self-serving. I've heard this from profs who had top ratings, yet they still detested it. The reason is how the website gathers its data. It's an open forum, so anyone can breeze in and post anything they want. Doesn't have to be a student. In fact, profs could be going in and rating themselves. So it's fraught with empirical flaws, and is discounted as a useless tool.

 

Only it's not. Anecdotally speaking, At the two universities I've taught at in the past 10 years, the ratings posted are spot on. The assholes, well, they're rated poorly. The great teachers, well, they're rated really well. I find that interesting, that such an open forum, so plagued by totally uncontrolled information gathering, still manages to hit the nail pretty much on the head. I like to think optimistically, and maybe it's the students themselves that, through their honesty, keep it pure. Not sure if that's true, but it's nice to think that way. In any event, when I'm advising my students and they want to know about a prof I know nothing about, I'll pull it up and check him/her out. It may be wrong, but it hasn't been yet (in my experience).

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lol, here in holland they actually sued such a website and it got removed from the web. I don't know the specifics any more but I think it was a privacy problem :P

 

anyways, what is your rank? :P

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I love the site, sure you'll have the one or two students who think they got screwed over by a teacher and leave them a nasty rating and comment mostly out of rage. But the rest of the students usually leave very helpful and like you said spot on information. I know a LOT of people who base their classes off of that site. Pretty powerful tool if you ask me.

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Only students who feel strongly about their professors will actually go and leave a comment. A great professor will likely gather overwhelming positive feedback and vice versa. Those in the middle won't have anything to say and usually don't.

 

I leave comments on pickaprof on all my professors at the end of the semester and try to be as unbiased as possible, but I know lots of people leave feedback based on the grade they received, usually thinking they "deserved better"

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That's very interesting. We have a similar thing for subjects taught at our university. At the end of every semester students can evaluate both the subjects and their professors on a 1-10 scale plus there's place to leave a comment. It's not used that much, even if it's absolutely anonymous for the students.

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Most universities give out teaching evaluations at the end of the class. They're administered by the university. They use them to evaluate the profs. Some schools take them seriously, some pretend to but could give a shit less. Regardless, I've never seen them published. So you have no idea what other people said about a prof.

 

That's what makes these sites unique. (I'm working on getting a pick-a-prof id..thanks for the lead Yang). Everything is out there, so you can see what other people think.

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