Rate My Professor is a review website that allows college students to give ratings of professors and has been around since May of 1999 to give feedback to students and professors alike. The platform allows students to sing the highest of praises about their professors, to drag them through the mud, and everything in between.
52 professors responded by email and through personal interviews during the period from Nov. 22 to Nov. 27 to share their thoughts concerning the platform, providing information on how it made them feel and how they viewed it.
Some professors don’t even look at the website, saving their own feelings for fear of what the comments say or because of what they suspect may be biased reviews.
David Lardner, an English professor, said he won’t look at it. “I’m terrified of it. It’s my kryptonite,” Lardner said. “My kids looked at it and I told them not to tell me what it says. It really f**** you up.”
Course evaluations give a more complete picture of how one does as an instructor, suggests Jesse Feller, a mathematics instructor. Instead of a few biased responses on Rate My Professor you get many evaluations from almost all the students in class, he explained.
Jeffrey Bolt, an associate college lecturer in the School of Communication, said, “Unfortunately, I believe many will superficially use the service to determine who may be the "easiest" grader, who may be the funniest.”
Others may visit the site on occasion.
Adam Sonstegard, an English professor, said he visits Rate My Professor out of curiosity and concern for one's reputation. One can go several semesters without specific, constructive criticism from the course evaluations, leaving Rate My Professor as a useful alternative.
“That said,” Sonstegard commented, “The site's ratings are anonymous, anecdotal exceptions to the rule, and need to be taken with grains of salt. If I teach 100 students a year, two of them might comment about it on RMP, and no one goes to the site to say anything average. It's your fanbase singing praises, or malcontents with axes to grind, but it's not fairly representative of most students' average experiences.”
Sonstegard concluded that, while he’s pro speech, he encourages people who are reading those ratings to read critically--not just critically of the professors, but also of the subjective, anonymous raters on the site.
Some have also gone on to say that these reviews are emotionally based. Rate My Professor is a place for the students to review, and that’s deeply based on personal experiences persuaded by how they were made to feel.
Anup Kumar, an associate professor in the School of Communication, said, “It’s an emotional response often. It was primarily how they felt. They need to go somewhere and put together a response. If professors start responding emotionally, we won’t get anywhere. You have to be able to read through it and use it constructively. This site is more effective, it’s more emotional, and the questions are framed to receive a certain response.”
In the end, many agreed that, while they may not go look at what students have to say, students deserve a platform to speak about their experiences and that the website is only as good as the people that use it.
“The idea behind the service is to give the students an introduction or preview of the particular professor,” Bolt said. “Before the first day of class, students can have a better expectation of the professor and limit some anxiety associated with the unknown.”
“All evaluations are good,” Kumar said. “I think they should happen. They help students learn and know about the professor. It helps professors know what’s working. It’s not useless.”
“Just like the traditional ratings you do for the university,” Bolt said, “there are potential benefits but also some pitfalls with the use of Rate My Professor. Similar to any online review, the review is only as good as the reviewer.”
Matthew Henry, an Economics instructor, said, “When I was still in grad school and first started teaching, my fellow grad students and I used to look at it all the time. Perhaps obsessively. That was about when the website had just gotten going, and students used it frequently. Over time, fewer and fewer people posted to it, so I checked it less frequently. As an economics teacher, I must now interject that websites like RMP have what we call "network effects" -- they become more valuable the more people use them.”