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So would you say on the whole that female STEM faculty are just worse than male STEM faculty?</p>
<p>My friend is a prof (STEM), and she reads her RMP ratings/comments. She finds some of the criticism constructive, and she discusses them with current and former students to find out how she might be able to grow & change. She discounts other comments, such as those that indicate she expects too much … she is very straightforward about her expectations, and she is clear that her classes are not remedial classes. She has posted office hours that she keeps, and she is willing to meet with students outside of office hours if they need that. Ultimately, she expects her students to have adequate preparation prior to taking her class, to seek her help if they do not, and to heed her advice to drop the class if she suggests to them that it would be wise to do so. And when she sees comments that indicate her tests are hard, she has no problem … she has yet to see that they are “unfair,” but if she did she would take that to heart.</p>
<p>My D has used RPM religiously. She doesn’t shy away from “hard.” She DOES stay away from any profs whose comments indicate that they are scattered … she can handle just about anything but that. She currently has a prof who didn’t have any RMP ratings. That prof will have them after this term! The prof is not only scattered, but the class bears no resemblance to the course description or posted syllabus. Those are the things she looks for on RMP, and she plans to share her experience for the sake of others.</p>
<p>S uses RMP to find evidence of things such as inability to communicate with students. Other than that, he isn’t too picky.</p>
<p>sylvan8798, if you have students like my friend has in her classes, YOU are most likely not the problem. Too many students expect extra credit, good grades for showing up or for “trying,” etc. And if you are like my friend & expect mastery of the material in order to EARN an A, you can probably expect disgruntled students who will post about how awful you are. It’s sad.</p>
<p>I think many students are used to good grades for minimal work. They are surprised by the expectations of college profs, and they are quite vocal about the fact that they don’t think it’s fair. Yet they don’t put in the effort required to receive the good grade.</p>
<p>My son is a senior graduating from a California State University this May. RMP has been an INVALUABLE tool for him in choosing her classes/professors. We didn’t use it his first semester and paid the price! I recommend it to everyone, and as others have commented, you must read the reviews with an open mind. Certain teachers have concrete trends (both negative & positive) that have always proved correct in our opinion…</p>
<p>Ditto to MomToCollegeKids and Kelsmom ( I have not fallen off the face of the earth and owe you a letter). Both S and D use ratemyprofessor-but have found the importance of correlating the classes professor is rated on and the ones yo are planning to take. DD has attended an well-known LAC and done 2 transient semesters at Georgia Tech-much larger school than her LAC. As with other posters, if professor has large number of ratings-many of whom are recent she utilizes the information. Ease of professor is not concern-things both kids have found very reliable are potential problems with professor availability, if exams cover material presented in class, willingness of professor to open discussion. Some schools will also have a data base of student grade outcomes by professor, course number and semester. Daughter found that those results at GT were very consistent with Rate my professor.</p>
<p>Keetermom wrote:
“My son is a senior graduating from a California State University this May. RMP has been an INVALUABLE tool for him in choosing her classes/professors. We didn’t use it his first semester and paid the price!”</p>
<p>My son is also at a California State University and we did not know about RMP for his first three semesters and we, particularly my son, paid a terrible price. I sure wish I had known that his Calculus1 professor had been consistently receiving extremely negative ratings since 2004 with the number increasing each year. I realize that there is probably not a college or university in the country that does not have at least one utterly incompetent professor on its faculty that has no business being in a classroom, and fortunately they are in the minority, but it is still painful when your child is victimized by one of these people. Checking RMP is the best way I have found as a way that you can possibly protect your child from the damage that a pathological professor can do to them.</p>
<p>Sylvan8789 wrote:</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>I have no doubt that a college math professor “knows the material” in all lower division undergraduate math courses but when they fail to express it coherently, make numerous errors working problems on the board, get confused and are unable to write a comprehensible exam or grade it in a consistent and rational manner it is not hard for freshman and sophomore college students to be more likely to assume these things happen because the professor does not know the material than be aware of the far more likely explanation that while they know the material, they are just unable to teach it.</p>
<p>This thread reminded me to go back and rate last semester’s professors. Went with a quick value judgement and specifics about the class.</p>
<p>Also, if you want to quote someone, just do this:</p>
<p>[noparse]
[/noparse]</p>
<p>It turns out like this:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Or, this:</p>
<p>[noparse]
[/noparse]</p>
<p>Becomes:</p>
<p>
</p>
<br>
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<p>Well, the earlier poster was about algebra and I don’t think that it
was the Modern kind.</p>
<p>My son had to take a required math course at his school and he didn’t
jump on signing up when it opened up. There are two professors that
teach the course. One is good and the other is awful. Our son had
taken a course with the good professor before. So everyone that knew
or read RMP would have signed up with the good professor.</p>
<p>Son took the course and did fine in it but mainly because he had
studied the course material ahead of time. The professor sometimes
asked him for help on proofs during class. The guy apparently is a
good researcher and brings in grant money so he is useful to the
math department but he’s awful at teaching. RMP reviews are spot
on - when every single review going back many years is strongly
negative, run!</p>
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<p>Let’s see–I describe one incredibly crappy female math professor whose ratings on RMP and MyEdu indicate it’s not a case of disgruntled students ganging up on her because she’s female, and you conclude that I must believe female STEM professors are worse than male STEM professors? Wow.</p>
<p>Just for the record, let me say that some male STEM professors just plain suck, too. I haven’t noticed an appreciable difference in quality between males and females. I just wouldn’t immediately assume criticism is based on sexist bias against females. Complaints that show up repeatedly are often valid, not just grousing by lazy students.</p>
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<p>Part of the problem is that teaching lower division classes is very different from teaching upper division and graduate classes. Professors often aren’t used to having to go through a bunch of computations, and they aren’t necessarily even good at that type of work. There are three types of mathematicians: ones that can count and ones that can’t.</p>
<p>As a math major that can make it difficult to read reviews sometimes, since very good professors for upper division courses often get dumped on by pre-meds that couldn’t care less about how to prove something.</p>
<p>BTW - I’m somewhat surprised at how many parents here seem to be actually involved in the process of choosing classes.</p>
<p>Has anyone here used RMP as a filter for selecting one’s school after multiple acceptances have rolled in?</p>
<p>
Quote all 3 postings. I suggested that students are harsher on female faculty, in general, or on average, and that there might be a bias. </p>
<p>You responded with “possibly (there is a bias), or” then quoted a specific example. Doesn’t the word “or” suggest that you would attribute the cause to something other than a bias? A specific example does not make a case for a trend in general at all. Certainly I could find equally dismal reviews of male STEM faculty. </p>
<p>If, indeed, students tend to be harsher on female faculty in their reviews, there must be some reason for it. Either some kind of bias, or the female faculty is, on average, worse. Maybe you can think of some other reason?</p>
<p>
It is interesting to note that the Ivy League schools tend to have a lower overall rating than some very much less prestigious schools…</p>
<p>My son took classes at our local community college every summer so he could graduate on time and commented that for GE classes, the teachers at CC were superior to many at his 4 year University…</p>
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<p>They probably don’t have to do research.</p>
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<p>Perhaps your observation that students are harsher on female faculty (which you admit is based on very limited data) isn’t accurate? Maybe females, on average, don’t get lower scores than males. Maybe it’s just that bad professors (male or female) get lower scores than good ones.</p>
<p>
That is possible as well. I would like to see a study done on this. Here is an example (not isolated) from my own experience: </p>
<p>I was a T.A. for a General Physics I course. There were 2 sections, 180 students each, 2 professors, and 2 T.A.s. Every week the teaching team met to discuss the homework problems and other instructions for the recitation sections, which were run by the T.A.'s (about 30 students enrolled in each rec.). At the first team meeting, Dr. M requested that in the first recitation we review the basic Calculus derivatives. So first class I say “Dr. M has requested we review some basic derivatives, so let’s do that.” And we do so for 10-15 minutes. End of the semester, one of the students says this (regarding me) in his/her review:<br>
</p>
<p>I have to wonder if this same student would have given the male T.A. (who also reviewed the derivatives) the benefit of the doubt in his decision to do what our boss asked us to do…</p>
<p>It’s entirely possible the student was biased against females. On the other hand, maybe he was just an arrogant little snot and would have trashed the male T.A. as well.</p>
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<p>We used it before applying to colleges. Son is a science major and most of the science professors at one particular school had terrible ratings.</p>