| URL | http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ |
|---|---|
| Type of site | review site |
| Owner | Viacom |
| Created by | 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 assign ratings to professors and campuses of American, Canadian, and United Kingdom institutions. The site was originally launched as TeacherRatings.com and converted to RateMyProfessors in 2001. RateMyProfessors.com was acquired in 2005 by Patrick Nagle and William DeSantis.[1] Nagle and DeSantis later resold RateMyProfessors.com in 2007 to Viacom's mtvU, MTV’s College channel.[2]
RateMyProfessors.com is the largest online destination for professor ratings. The site has 7,500+ schools and over 13,000,000 entirely student-generated comments and ratings, RateMyProfessors.com is the highest trafficked free site for researching and rating 1,500,000+ professors from colleges and universities across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. RateMyProfessors also has an iPhone app.
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Users who have or are currently taking a particular professor’s course, may post a rating and review of any professor already listed on the site. Furthermore, users 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 on their hotness, and may include comments of up to max 350 characters in length.
According to the website’s FAQ 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 "HOT" ratings is greater than zero (one "hot" rating equals +1, one "not hot" equals −1).
Each year, RateMyProfessors.com compiles Top Lists of the Highest Rated Professors, Hottest Professors, and Top Schools in the U.S. based on ratings and comments from students.
Since mtvU took over the website, RateMyProfessors.com has added a rebuttal feature which allows professors to rebut students' comments. Professors must register with the website, using an ".edu" e-mail address, in order to make their rebuttals. The site also has a feature called "Professors Strike Back" which features videos of professors responding to specific ratings that they received on RateMyProfessors.[3]
Students can also comment on and rate their school as well, by visiting their school's RateMyProfessors.com school page. School Ratings categories include Academic Reputation, Location, Campus, School Library, Food, Clubs & Activities, Social Events, and Happiness.
In 2008 ratemyprofessors.com was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2008.
| “ | Whether you're deciding between French teachers or you just want to vent about last semester's lousy history lecturer, Rate My Professors is the place to go. Students can anonymously grade profs on everything from how difficult they are to the clarity of their lectures — and now teachers can add rebuttals of their own.” | ” |
[4]
Student evaluations of Professors from Ratemyprofessors.com actually accounts for 25% of a schools rating in Forbes annual “America’s Best Colleges Listing.”
| “ | Students are consumers, who, ostensibly at least, attend college to learn and acquire knowledge and skills. The core dimension of the learning experience comes from attending classes taught by instructors. Asking students what they think about their courses is akin to what some agencies like Consumers Report or J.D. Powers and Associates do when they provide information on various goods or services. | ” |
[5]
Using data for 426 instructors at the University of Maine, [researchers] examined the relationship between RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) indices and formal in-class student evaluations of teaching (SET). The two primary RMP indices correlate substantively and significantly with their respective SET items: RMP overall quality correlates r = .68 with SET item, Overall, how would you rate the instructor?; and RMP ease correlates r = .44 with SET item, How did the work load for this course compare to that of others of equal credit? Further, RMP overall quality and RMP ease each correlates with its corresponding SET factor derived from a principal components analysis of all 29 SET items: r = .57 and .51, respectively. [6]
The main criticism of RMP is that there is little reason to think that the ratings accurately reflect the quality of the professors rated.[7][8] Also, "easiness", "clarity" and "helpfulness" are the only components taken into consideration.[9][10] Edward Nuhfer says that both Pickaprof.com and RMP "are transparently obvious in their advocacy that describes a 'good teacher' as an easy grader. ... Presenter Phil Abrami...rated the latter as 'The worst evaluation I've seen' during a panel discussion on student evaluations at the 2005 annual AERA meeting."[11] A study of RMP ratings conducted by James Felton found that "the hotter and easier professors are, the more likely they’ll get rated as a good teacher."[12] Edward Nuhfer has argued, "Pseudo-evaluation damages the credibility of legitimate evaluation and victimizes individuals by irresponsibly publishing comments about them derived from anonymous sources. This is voyeurism passed off as 'evaluation' and examples lie at http://www.pickaprof.com/ and http://ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp. Neither site provides evaluation of faculty through criteria that might be valuable to a student seeking a professor who is conducive to their learning, thinking or intellectual growth."[13]
Single individuals are able to make multiple separate ratings of a single professor on RMP.[14] RMP admits [15] that while it does not allow such multiple ratings from any one IP address, it has no control over raters who use several different computers, or those that "spoof" IP addresses. Also, there is no way of knowing 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,[16] As recently as May 2006, the FAQ page on RMP 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.[17] | ” |
Critics state that a number of the ratings focus on qualities they see as irrelevant to teaching, such as physical appearance.[18]
It is common at universities and colleges for faculty (especially junior faculty) to be called on by their departments to teach courses on topics that are not within their area(s) of expertise, which can earn them poor ratings at RMP that do not reflect the ability of those professors to teach courses on subjects that they are much more qualified to teach. RMP, though it lets the student identify the course that they took with the professor, lumps together the ratings for all courses taught by each professor, instead of providing separate ratings averages for each course taught.
Part time (also known as adjunct) faculty are not always readily identifiable nor verifiable, as part-time professors often work at multiple schools or maintain employment outside the school.
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