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A screenshot from www.ratemyprofessors.com

RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is a review site, founded in May 1999 by John Swapceinski, a software engineer from Menlo Park, California, which allows college and university students to anonymously assign ratings to professors of American, Canadian, British, New Zealand, and Australian institutions. The site contains more than six million ratings, for over 500,000 professors. The site was originally launched as TeacherRatings.com and converted to RateMyProfessors in 2001.

All ratings are supposed to be anonymous without any instructor input or decisions. According to the site's privacy policy, RateMyProfessors.com will only reveal a user's personal information in response to a court order or a subpoena.[1]

In November 2005, RateMyProfessors was sold to Patrick Nagle and William DeSantis.[2] The site was sold again in January 2007 this time to MTVu, a subsidiary of Viacom.


Ratings and reviews on RateMyProfessors

Anyone who goes onto the website, with cookies enabled, may post a rating and review of any professor already listed on the site, and may create a listing for any individual not already listed. To be posted, a rater must rate the course and/or professor on a 1-5 scale in the following categories: "easiness", "helpfulness", "clarity", the rater's "interest" in the class prior to taking it, and the degree of "textbook use" in the course. The rater may also rate the professor’s "appearance" as "hot" or "not", and may include "comments" of up to 350 characters in length.

According to the website’s FAQs page, "The Overall Quality rating [that the professor ends up with] is the average of a teacher's Helpfulness and Clarity ratings...." It’s the professor’s Overall Quality rating that determines whether his/her name, on the list of professors, is accompanied by a little smiley face (meaning "Good Quality"), a frowny face ("Poor Quality"), or an in-between, expressionless face ("Average Quality"). A professor's name is accompanied by a chili pepper icon if the sum of his or her appearance ratings is greater than zero (one "hot" rating equals +1, one "not hot" equals -1).

Michael Hussey, who helped design RateMyProfessors, sums up its purpose: "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."[3]

Criticism

How Accurate are the Ratings?

  • Perhaps the main criticism of RateMyProfessors is that there may be little reason to think that the ratings – either the Overall Quality rating or the individual ratings and comments – represent the truth about the quality of the professors rated.[4][5] For one thing, there may be no good reason to think that raters are even attempting to represent the truth in their ratings or comments. And even when they are, there is perhaps insufficient reason to think that the facts raters have in mind are actually representative of the quality of the professors. The format seems to presume that raters are all well-informed, competent, and impartial judges of clarity, helpfulness, and easiness, not to mention appearance. Even more importantly, the range of areas on which students are invited to rate their professors is narrow. There may be no good reason to think that clarity and helpfulness are the only or even the major components of quality instruction in general.[6] And it may even be true in some cases that high quality instruction can be given when clarity and helpfulness are lacking.

Who's Doing the Rating?

  • Some have criticized the passive method of data collection. Clearly there are few, if any, cases where a professor listed on RateMyProfessors has been rated by every one of his/her students, or by every student in a single course, or even by most of the students in a single course. So, for this reason alone, it may be doubted whether the ratings are representative of anything more than opinions of a tiny minority. Furthermore, there is some reason to think that those students who do rate a professor have very strong feelings (positive or negative), while students who do not have strong feelings will tend not to bother rating the professor at all. The site itself admits that the ratings are "not really" statistically valid.[7]
  • Also, studies of research methodology have shown that in formats where people are able to post opinions publicly, group polarization often occurs. The result is that a given instructor will often receive very positive comments, very negative comments, and little in between, meaning that those who would have been in the middle are either silent or pulled to one extreme or the other. By presenting such comments as the consensus of a student body about an instructor, the evaluation can be confusing, not to mention misleading.
  • Yet another problem with RateMyProfessors is that a student with a vendetta or perhaps an unrequited crush can make multiple entries [8] either boosting or sabotaging a given professor's rating. While Ratemyprofessors.com alleges[citation needed] that it does not allow multiple ratings of any one professor from any one IP address, it has no control over raters who use several different computers, and in actuality only conducts minimal policing of ratings, frequently allowing multiple ratings from even a single IP address. Additionally, there is no way to ensure that those who rate a professor's course have actually taken the course in question, making it possible for professors to rate themselves and each other,[9] and for posters to rate professors based purely on hearsay for any reason imaginable. As recently as May 2006, the FAQ page on Ratemyprofessors.com itself said:
"Who can rate? Is it limited to students? We prefer that you only rate teachers you have first-hand knowledge of. However, it is not possible for us to verify which raters had which teachers, so always take the ratings with a grain of salt. Remember, we have no way of knowing who is doing the rating - students, the teacher, other teachers, parents, dogs, cats, etc."[10]
  • Finally, there is no way to ensure that instructors themselves are not rating themselves and their colleagues in an attempt to boost their perceived teaching competence.

How Relevant are Raters' Comments?

  • Another complaint concerning the method of evaluation used by RateMyProfessors is that unlike other methods of rating teacher performance, most teachers themselves do not feel they gain any helpful feedback. Rather, they say that it only leads to the harassment or denigration of particular instructors. [11][12] Critics state that a number of the ratings for professors border on ridiculousness, including attacks on physical appearance. Moreover, some students might blatantly lie about the cost of textbooks for a course or the manner in which the class is taught. In some of these instances, the students writing the misleading and sometimes false criticisms may be ones who missed numerous classes or failed to examine all items on a course webpage or in textbooks. Finally, whereas instructors are actually taught how to teach in classes and at seminars before becoming instructors, students are not and therefore are not qualified to rate the quality of instructors. They can generally make only personal and emotional remarks, rather than informed criticisms based on well-rounded knowledge of the teaching profession and what its members have determined to be "good" teaching.

Missing the point of education?

  • Instructors have voiced concern that it and similar methods are in fact counterproductive to the educational process by minimizing the importance of quality in instruction and instead encouraging students to see themselves as consumers filling out product satisfaction surveys, a disheartening perception of student values [13]. This sentiment has been articulated by Mark Edmundson[14] of the University of Virginia, among others, in what has been described as an influential essay[15] on the topic of course evaluations.

References

  1. ^ RMP Privacy Policy
  2. ^ John Swapceinski announces sale of RateMyProfessors.com
  3. ^ Everybody's a Critic - New York Times 23 April 2006
  4. ^ Sacha Pfeiffer, "Ratings sites flourish behind a veil of anonymity", September 20, 2006, Boston Globe Online[1]
  5. ^ Kenneth Westhues, "Stephen Berman: Scapegoat", Dec 2006[2]
  6. ^ James M. Lang, "RateMyBuns.com", Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2003 [3]
  7. ^ www.ratemyprofessors.com/faq.jsp, accessed May 16, 2007
  8. ^ [4]
  9. ^ Gabriela Montell, "The Art of the Bogus Rating", Chronicle of Higher Education, September 27, 2006[5]
  10. ^ huh also quoted in Westhues "Stephen Berman: Scapegoat"
  11. ^ Hot for Teacher Students
  12. ^ [Steve Giegerich] Associated Press, "Web warnings: Sites extol, slam professors", Feb 2003, CNN Online[6]
  13. ^ The Hottest Professor on Campus
  14. ^ Mark Edmundson, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students", Sept 1997
  15. ^ Book Reviews, Averett Library News Winter 2005 [7]
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