<p>Just a thought, but it seems like professors could go on there themselves and write things like “A rewarding class, but you have to work hard. Not an easy A, but worth it if you like the subject” to make sure they didn’t get a class full of slackers.</p>
<p>Though it would be better to actually be like that. Word would spread, and would get on RMP, too.</p>
<p>I like dmt’s rules for figuring out if a review is accurate.</p>
<p>The foreign accent has been a huge problem for my son in engineering classes.</p>
<p>I can see how the reviews may be sent by those who are angry about their class grades. You will likely see those negative reviews more than positive reviews. If a student had a good class with an amazing prof, what are the chances they will post that?</p>
<p>I wish there had been something like this when I was in college. We often found out the hard way - after a class had begun and you couldn’t change into a different section.</p>
<p>I don’t know how much they check, I know you have to give an email address from the college if I’m not mistaken. I’m sure though that it’s not too strict.</p>
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I don’t know if it varies by college, but when I make ratings, I don’t even have to sign in. I just fill out the online form and hit submit.</p>
<p>I have found the ratings for my son’s HS teachers to be fairly accurate. You get the occasioanal kid who just wants to complain, but most of the comments are fairly accurate.</p>
<p>My daughter has found the site very useful both in picking professor when she had the option and in preparing for those with less than stellar recommendations when she didn’t. But, as noted above, one must read many reviews to truly get a sense of whether you will think this person is a great professor - a smiley face alone isn’t necessarily helpful. One freshman English instructor had good reviews but moved to the “no” column after my duaghter read that students watched “Borat” in class, D1 didn’t want to see Sacha in the man-kini a second time - or write a paper about it.</p>
<p>D1 uses it all the time, and has found it quite helpful. But is it sort of like CC 
You have to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. If there are only a few reviews, she is wary of the information. She reads ALL the reviews, and watches for “sour grapes”. </p>
<p>She used it freshman year to work out her schedule. One thing she found (seems so obvious, but I am not sure everyone thinks of it) is that the popular/good professors’ classes fill up really quickly, EXCEPT for the early morning ones. As she is quite disciplined and does not oversleep when she has class, she was able to get some of the highest rated profs even freshman year by signing up for those early morning classes.</p>
<p>Honestly, as a student with an LD, I find ratemyprofessors to be an extremely important part of my course selection-- this is how I find out whether or not the instructor’s teaching style is going to be a problem for me, and at my school there really isn’t any other way to get that information. You can’t get a syllabus or anything like that in advance even if you tell the professor that you have an LD and want it for that reason, I’ve tried that and they don’t go along with it. If a professor has 50 different reviews that ALL say he’s incredibly disorganized, I know that I might have a problem. There’s a professor at my school that has numerous reviews spanning several years all documenting him choosing not to show up to exams and just letting the students sit there. Would be a HUGE problem for me. If a professor has a lot of recent reviews saying he doesn’t use powerpoint or any kind of visuals in his lectures, that might be a problem for me and is worth considering in conjunction with other factors. Another thing worth looking for is comments about what the professor’s attendance policy is, as I prefer only to take one or two classes with strict attendance requirements at a time because doing otherwise causes calamity given my health conditions. There is a LOT more to read than, “omg professor x SUCKS OMG OMG THIS CLASS IS SO HARD.” Students know well enough to ignore those comments and focus on the ones that actually provide tangible information, like thirty different reviews from last semester that all say, “took two months to return papers.”</p>
<p>Personally, I go through every semester and review every professor I took, and so do my friends. While it’s certainly true that there is a bias in anything with voluntary participation, I think a lot more people review routinely than you might think.</p>
<p>I have taken professors before with bad reviews on RMP, or professors with none, when weighing the pros and cons made it such that doing so was practical. The bad professors were pretty bad, and with few or no reviews it’s really a toss up. If it’s a class I really want to take, during a time slot I really want, with subject matter I am confident with, the review is not necessarily that important and I am willing to take a chance with someone with mediocre or scant reviews. When it’s uniformly really really bad or really really good, though, that is helpful and it is useful to get clues about teaching style in advance like I described above.</p>
<p>My S, was complaining about some of his Profs the first semester his freshman year. We later found RMP and it was spot on!</p>
<p>However, since then we have realized that, as with any other opinion site, you have to be smart. Watch which classes the comments are for. They may not teach one well, but may excel at teaching another. And, as others have commented, you can usually tell by the verbiage if you should take the review seriously.</p>
<p>Also, it’s good to pay attention to when the reviews were written. One my D looked at had a bad overall review, but if you looked at the individual reviews you could see that most of the poor comments were from 2004 and 2005. The recent ones were great - just not enough to affect the average yet. That probably happens the other way around too.</p>
<p>
This is good advice, I have found it to be true, as well. Especially for English or Literature professors, for some reason. According to RMP, the professor I had for English 101 was very good for English 101 but very bad for English 102, according to multiple people who took both with the same professor. The pattern continued with some literature professors as well.</p>
<p>Our kids use RMP, but they try to use it with some discernment. If a prob only has 1 or 2 reviews, then the accuracy is going to be questionable. If the 1 or 2 reviews are negative, then chances are that the students just had an ax to grind …likely for receiving a low grade for not studying. </p>
<p>the most accurate reviews are when there are 10 or more.</p>
<p>Also…be SURE to notice WHICH course each student is reviewing. A prof may not be great at teaching XClass, but may be great at teaching YClass.</p>
<p>also, older negative reviews can be largely ignored if the newer reviews are more favorable. Sometimes it can take a prof a semester or two of teaching a particular course to “get the bugs out.” :)</p>
<p>Neither I nor my oldest son had ever heard of RMP when he went off to a state university to major in Geology. His first term he was doing poorly in Pre-Calculus and said that his professor was really bad. I just thought my son was not working hard enough and was trying to blame his poor performance on his professor. I spent the entire Thanksgiving break going over the material with him and was shocked at how little he knew and got angry with my son for being a slacker. Somehow he managed to get a C and went on to Calculus1 where his troubles seemed to get infinitely worse and I again thought he was slacking off. Then, he brought home one of his midterms and I was shocked to see how the questions were written in totally illegible longhand, made no sense, and were graded on an arbitrary and inconsistent basis. I began to think maybe there was a problem with the professor after all. He put everything he had into it and again got another C while a third of the class got Fs.</p>
<p>Then came Calculus2 and he had the same professor he had for pre-calculus and he was again struggling but I was more inclined to believe him when he said that the professor just could not teach. My son got a C+ and moved on to Calculus3 where suddenly he was getting straight As, knew an amazing amount of math and was really enthusiastic about taking more upper division math courses. </p>
<p>Finally, I heard about RMP and looked these professors up. The Calc1 professor had a 1.2 rating and there were 47 entries, 45 of which ranked her as unfavorable and they included comments such as “worst teacher I have ever had” " HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE", “worst professor in the whole university”, “who hired this women and why is she still teaching here?”. The comments also included specific examples of how she would babble incoherently, nothing she wrote on the board was legible, how nasty and dismissive she was towards students, hopelessly disorganized and was hardly ever able to work a problem on the board without making numerous errors. The two “acceptable” ratings basically came with comments that she is bad but maybe not the worst professor in the university. The pre-calculus and calculus2 professor had a 1.6 rating and over 30 comments that were similar to those of the calculus1 teacher. The Calculus3 professor had a 4.3 score with many very positive comments.</p>
<p>I came away from this ashamed of myself for not trusting my son and at the same time having tremendous admiration for him for remaining determined to take more math classes despite what he had gone through. Many of the comments on the first two professors said “I used to love math and always got As in it but now I will never take math again after this class”. I never knew my son had such a capacity for not allowing himself to be defeated by such terribly adverse situations. I am also furious that my son had to suffer so much and get saddled with 12 semester units of Cs which have destroyed his GPA and will be a millstone around his neck when he applies to graduate school or a job because of these two utterly worthless and sorry excuses for professors. In fact they are worse than useless. If they were worthless it would just mean they had no value, these two are actually pathological and should not be in a classroom doing the damage they do.</p>
<p>Rate my Professor was spot on and I am now a true believer in it. If a professor gets 45 out of 47 ratings on RMP saying she is the worst teacher they have ever had, you would be a fool to let your child take a course with that professor.</p>
<p>Both my kids used RMP for choosing classes at big state u. S took two elective classes that
he normally would not have chosen because of the great reviews the two profs got on RMP.
In both cases RMP was right and S enjoyed the classes.</p>
<p>Personally, my colleagues and I (professors all) find RMP hilarious. It is so interesting to see the student point of view.</p>
<p>I once got into an argument with a student who hadn’t read the book and was upset when I showed her that almost half of the exam came straight from the questions either within the book chapter or at the end of the chapter. I told her that I had assigned the reading and that I had spoken about specific tables and figures in class. She argued with me, because the RMP comments all told her that I didn’t use the textbook! How could I have started doing that!?! Well, I have always used the book or I wouldn’t assign it. Based on this experience, I consider RMP less than completely reliable.</p>
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<p>That bothers me as well.</p>
<p>I’ve never used the site to pick a prof but I have looked up profs I’ve had. I’ve found it to be a mixed bag. </p>
<p>My big surprise came when I looked up a relative of mine who is a prof. She had terrible ratings!</p>
<p>*I think any site that lets you rate a professor’s “hotness” is suspect at best.
*</p>
<p>I think that is just funny…no value, just funny. </p>
<p>* She argued with me, because the RMP comments all told her that I didn’t use the textbook! How could I have started doing that!?! Well, I have always used the book or I wouldn’t assign it. Based on this experience, I consider RMP less than completely reliable. *</p>
<p>Did you check RMP to see if the comments really said that about THAT particular class? Is it possible that she made that up or got you confused with another one of her profs?</p>
<p>I think if I were a prof and there were posts that were totally factually wrong, I would post the real info. You can’t argue with students who claim a class is “too hard,” but you can correct misinformation about whether you use a req’d book or not.</p>
<p>One observation I have made, (admittedly based on very limited data) is that female faculty teaching STEM courses seem to be more harshly rated than their male counterparts. Maybe harder to be seen as credible?</p>
<p>Even in a couple of my remedial algebra end-of-course review forms students have answered the rating question “professor knows the material” with “strongly disagree”. I always wished I could find them and ask them what it was, exactly, that I did that made them think I didn’t know the material :(. I have to think it likely they were just disgruntled and thought they could make trouble for me by giving bad reviews.</p>
<p>
That is the only explanation for them saying you don’t know the remedial algebra material. I’m sorry that so many students take grades personally; unless a teacher is particularly bad at teaching or communicating (and your posting on this website makes me greatly doubt that), the fault is with the student for bad grades.</p>
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<p>Possibly, or some of them just plain suck.</p>
<p>One math professor at S’s school has 88 ratings, with an overall quality of 1.6. As two students put it, </p>
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</p>
<p>and</p>
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</p>
<p>I checked her out on MyEdu.com, which lists the grade distributions for each professor in each course. Her Intro to Statistics course had an average GPA of 1.23, with 42% getting a D or F, and 27% withdrawing. Sounds pretty consistent with the RMP ratings.</p>
<p>I think as parents, we have all heard (or had) bad professors, bad at communicating, bad at caring if anyone “gets it”, etc. They are everywhere and most students can’t avoid them all. My son felt lucky to have under 4 in 4 years. There are students though at every college and they can be very smart, but they want an easy A and get upset if minimal effort doesn’t get them one. They trust they know the system of that class but don’t go to office hours or email the professor,etc.
I’ve heard it at both ends, comforted my son when a test was said to be one thing and then was another, when he got a B for a course when none of his grades were under B+, when office hours were useless and the professor was just repeating what he said in class. I’ve also heard from professors, professors at Yale, our state school, Sacred Heart, and they have horror stories also. Students that never come to class, do the mimimal and want A’s. Students they never hear from until finals come out. Many have told me the urge to give better grades sometimes comes from the school, sometimes from the “popularity contest” many are in. Reviews are used to some extent and if you don’t pander to them to some degree, they can kill you in reviews, (in school not so much RYP) They have students actually say they will write a bad one. One professor talked to the NYTimes and said she wouldn’t acquiesce and give points when no effort was given by the student but had gotten some flak because of it.
I feel for the students very much, tell my children to keep ears and eyes open for a great professor, but was also very heartened to see them take a great professor who graded fairly over the more popular easy A professor that didn’t know the material as well, but you knew you could do a little and get by. As my son said, an easy professor sometimes gets better reviews, but you don’t always learn very much, balance is the key.</p>