<p>I have seen many posters on this forum recommend ratemyprofessor to students/parents who are having professor issues. I did not find a recent thread on the merits of this site. Since things are a little slow as we await the decisions of our aspiring college entrees, I thought I would start one. </p>
<p>I won't, in this initial post, voice my personal position, but I will give this disclaimer: I have been an adjunct and/or a TA for over 15 years. My name is not among those listed for any school on rmp, although I was alluded to, negatively, in a post regarding another professor.</p>
<p>It hasn’t led me wrong in 27 classes (with something like 18-20 professors).</p>
<p>That said, you really have to learn to read it. If a poster uses all caps, poor grammar, is excessively angry, uses wild name calling, says (s)he wants an easy A, and is contradicted by several others, you have to discount it. Others, which speak clearly, can give you a better picture. If reviews are uniformly negative, then the professor is less likely to be as good as one who has very positive reviews.</p>
<p>Of course, sometimes a good but difficult professor receives several bad ratings, in which case reading what each person has to say may be helpful. Obviously it won’t be accurate for everyone, I have just found it to be a very useful tool.</p>
<p>I usually look for certain less-subjective descriptors… like “take home final” or “essay exam” or whatever, on top of the sort of stuff that BillyMc describes. If you know how to read it you can get a pretty good idea about what a course will be like most of the time.</p>
<p>It’s important to realize that the students who post on these sites are usually those who want to complain, but still, it’s possible to glean some useful information from some of the posts.</p>
<p>For example, if multiple people criticize a specific aspect of the professor and course, such as “The material on the tests is unrelated to what is taught in class,” or “The papers are graded by the TAs, and the grading varies greatly from one TA to another,” that’s useful information.</p>
<p>Good thread topic! I’ve been on the site, although my oldest is at a LAC where I think people get to know the professors’ reputations pretty quickly. I’m also aware of the response bias inherent in a site like this. I’m wondering if it might not be more helpful for the larger schools, with huge faculties? BillyMc–that’s a good recommendation. Are you talking about a larger school?</p>
<p>DS used it in this way: he was attempting a very tough class, a stretch, on top of a normal/heavy load. After the first couple classes was unsure of the prof. Went on Ratemyprof and found consistent not so great reviews of the prof. Decided (with some discussion with parents) that attempting a tough subject was great and honorable, but should be done with a really fine prof. He chose another class. Very useful info if you read every post on the site and as others here have said, recognize reporting bias. If there’s a mix of reviews, fine - one man’s meat is another’s poison. If by far the majority reviews tip one way or the other, take notice, IMO.</p>
<p>I think you have to take the ratings with a grain of salt, because (1) you have no idea if the student providing the rating is a student similar to you who is looking for the same things in a teacher as you are, (2) many of the students providing ratings are immature and have no clue and (3) you don’t know the motivation of the student providing the rating - some go there because they have an axe to grind, legitimate or not. That said, noting trends can be useful. Reading comments can be useful. And sometimes the ratings are amazingly accurate. My BIL is a college professor and even he would admit that his ratings are spot on (right down to the hotness factor). I wouldn’t rely on them if there are only a few ratings, but if there are a lot of ratings and there is a dominant trend, especially in the particular class you want to take, I’d seriously consider it. My D has used both ratemyteachers (for high school) and ratemyprofessors (for college) and finds them to be flawed but useful.</p>
<p>Two of my kids have found rate my professor fairly helpful.</p>
<p>I think it is imperative to read each comment rather than the composite score because you may find the thing that makes one person score low may be just what another student prefers (take home test, tests based on on discussion, etc).</p>
<p>One of mine found it particularly useful when two courses of interest were offered at the same open spot in the schedule. Found a favorite professor that way and then registered for other courses he taught.</p>
<p>I looked up an old friend of mine. I thought her ratings were probably pretty accurate - knows her stuff but a boring lecturer and always late. Especially the always late part!</p>
<p>My son has found the reviews of his professors at BigStateU to be largely accurate. We use the site together to pick his courses for the upcoming semester. Of course, common sense principles are needed in evaluating the information:
The larger the sample size of reviews for a particular professor, the better. I discount the reviews for a prof if there is only a couple of them.
Concrete information shared across many reviews is more likely to be accurate, e.g. if “has a foreign accent you can’t understand” shows up in 28 of 30 reviews, it’s a good bet the prof actually has a difficult to understand foreign accent.
In general, reviews that provide concrete backup for a position are better than those that don’t. Ignore reviews that say “He sucks”, but pay attention to reviews that say “is consistently late to class” or “is consistently available at office hours.”
The best reviews are those that provide some detail concerning exactly what was learned in the course. “I made it through AP calc in high school, but didn’t really understand it. This professor’s explanation of limits and the fundamental theorem of calculus made it all come together for me.” Reviews with this kind of detail are more likely to accurately reflect experience than “he’s a great prof” or “he sucks”, because the latter are easier to thoughtlessly post on the internet in a moment.</p>
<p>Like anything else, use ratemyprof as another data point. Don’t use it solely base your decision on. For all its worth, there was an article several weeks back about the best professor according to ratemyprof was this guy from University of Washington DC (or something like that). Prior to this report, I had not even heard of this school. Anyway, later it was found out that he dished out bonus points to his students to give him excellent reviews on ratemyprof. This being a fairly open and anonymous system, people can manipulate it if they wish to. You don’t even have to be a student to write a review and you can create as many login IDs as you want.</p>
<p>Yes, caveat emptor is always in order. But a professor can keep up a scam like that only as long as everyone is willing to keep quiet about it… eventually, a review exposing it will appear on ratemyprofessor.</p>
<p>Our kids use it for picking out professors and it has been fairly useful but there are times when it isn’t (few reviews or suspect reviews). Sometimes it’s useful to get an idea of the professor when you have to take the course anyways so that you’re prepared for potential problems.</p>
<p>One former co-worker discussed his RMP evaluations with us. He made the mistake of giving a student some extra-credit work to bring up the grade after much pleading. The student published told this to others in the course and he received negative ratings for showing favoritism to a student. Sometimes you can’t win and then it gets out on the internet. I think that he generally agreed with the other comments about him.</p>
<p>My son’s first quarter at college he read the reviews on his professors, but picked his classes by time of day, rather than professor review. For 2 of the classes the professor had gotten very bad reviews and everything they said turned out to be true. So now he pays a lot more attention to the reviews, which means sometimes he has to take a class earlier in the morning than he would like.</p>
<p>If you are choosing between 2 sections of the same course, taught by Professor A and Professor B, and Professor A does not appear on RMP (and no one else you know seems to know much about him/her), but Professor B appears with generally mixed reviews, what would you do?</p>
It would largely depend on what the mixed reviews say. I’ve chosen an unknown over a professor with mixed but fairly mediocre reviews before (and got lucky).</p>
<p>I’d look for any other kind of online presence - syllabi of other courses, lecture notes, etc. The professor might have RAs and TAs from past courses that you could ask for opinions about the professor. You might look for students with majors in the department that know the professors in the department better than non-majors. In some cases, you could email the professor asking about his expectations of students and how he runs his courses or you could drop in during office hours and ask a few questions.</p>
<p>My son picked his classes by time and what he needed but I would tell him the professors ratings (the first year anyway) About 5 were accurate but many negative ones he felt were written by students that didn’t put in the effort or wanted more than they should have expected. He found some professors very helpful although students said the professors weren’t, things like that.
Two though, that said “very hard tests, all multiple choice tests” were accurate. Sometimes if all of the reviews are bad, it gives you pause, but even then, if just a handful, it could have been just some disgruntled students.</p>