In my first year at DePauw, as soon as I got all of my classes confirmed, I looked up all of my professors on RateMyProfessors.com. I did this so I could get the good, the bad, and the ugly about each professor. I found that most of the reviews were overwhelmingly written by either people that really loved the professor or by those who despised the professor. I have always wondered if any other DePauw students use the site. Multiple professors I have spoken to attest that RateMyProfessors.com is not a reliable source for students picking classes.
RateMyProfessors.com is a website that, as its name implies, “rates” professors at universities. This service is aimed for students that are applying for courses so they know which professors to gravitate towards and which ones to avoid. Anyone can make a rating, with the only form of verification being a course code that needs to be entered the website’s form.
When filling out the form you see a prompt: “It’s your turn to grade Professor XYZ.” Anyone can then anonymously rate a professor from 1 to 5 based on their skills as an instructor and their level of difficulty. This can lead to students avoiding professors that are rated as being more difficult. Students can then add tags saying if they would take the professor again, if the class was taken for credit, if they used the textbooks, and if attendance was mandatory or not.
“The Prof. Stuff,” a New York Times blog, wrote a biting critique of the website. An instructor’s skills and difficulty are decided by anonymous internet users. To see if RateMyProfessors.com was also seen as problematic by students and professors, I Interviewed a few students and professors to get their thoughts on the website.
Sophomore Area Ramos uses RateMyProfessors.com to know whether professors are more lecture-based or discussion-based. In her first year, Ramos used the website when she did not know other students yet. Whenever Ramos checks the website she takes it with a grain of salt.
She noted that some of the ratings are exaggerated, “If a professor makes you work a lot, well we’re in college.”
“People can anonymously put anything they want without repercussions,” says first-year Michael Ocasek, “I’ve used it before and seen awful things written about different teachers in the past.”
“I don't like it when [the reviews] were just dissing a teacher and weren’t talking about the actual class,” said first-year Mikaela Karlozak. Karlozak used RateMyTeachers.com, which operates on the same premise, just for high school teachers.
“It's important to know...” Karlozak says on professors being scored by their difficulty, “...especially if you're about to fail and you need a class to raise your grade.”
“RateMyProfessors has existed since I was in college so I feel like I looked at it, and I just remember looking at it with a gigantic grain of salt,” said Assistant Professor of History Sarah Rowley.
“You grow by being challenged and doing work,” continued Rowley on how difficulty can be a possible factor against a professor.
Associate Professor Suman Balasubramanian, Mathematics, claims the subjectivity of the data does not lend a professor’s rating to be true. She believes it was used to mostly vent out against professors instead of providing constructive criticism. Balasubramanian has checked her score in the past and found the negative reviews to have been written by students that were not doing well in the class.
Overall the consensus among professors and students is that the website has its uses, but also inherent problems of subjectivity.
