<p>I'll start college this fall. I'm just wondering how accurate and reliable is RateMyProfessors website in general? I often see some pretty conflicted opinions on the site. Should I take those reviews and ratings into account when choosing courses in college? </p>
<p>It’s a very rough instrument. Watch out for the negative outliers. They often have an axe to grind that says more about them than the professor. Get a sense of the general trend, and be skeptical of any rating that has less than 10 or so reviewers. It’s just not enough data, even by RMP standards.</p>
<p>Yes.
If you see a professor with 100+ reviews and he has a 0.5 star rating… then probably opt out of his class. But most professors with a reasonable amount of reviews won’t have a 5 star rating, more like a 3-4 range.</p>
<p>DS found it a very good tool for choosing professors and preparing for the “type” of professor. You do not necessarily need to avoid those with bad ratings, but reading them at least lets you know what pitfalls to avoid, if tests are taken from lectures vs text, etc.</p>
<p>I thought it was very helpful, and always took a look before taking a class with a certain professor. I usually didn’t look at the ratings at all, and just read the reviews. Obviously, you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but the general consensus is usually more right than wrong. There’s a lot of truth to what people say, but it’s also important to remember that what might bother other students might not bother you and vice versa. So it’s always important to read the actual comments.</p>
<p>I use ■■■■■■■ and after a class I always submit honest reviews. I use ratemyprofessors back in community college. Was hit or miss really. ■■■■■■■ has been pretty good since a lot of people at my university use it. </p>
<p>I have a professor with 34 out of 40 negative reviews and 6 positive. They all say the same thing basically. My professor meets the reviews.</p>
<p>Generally it is pretty accurate. I’ve had some that sucked and who had awful reviews, but I’ve also had some brilliant gems who only had so-so ratings. </p>
<p>Here’s my rule of thumb:</p>
<p>Score of 4+ with a reasonable amount of reviews (so ideally 10 or more) : take. </p>
<p>Score or 3-4: usually take, but check to see why they’re not in the 4 range. Are they too hard, too boring, too unorganized, etc? Do a few people just hate their personality? </p>
<p>Under 3: try to avoid. It’s just easier to get better-rated profs if you can. Those in the mid-2s can really suck and hurt your GPA. I was forced into this situation this semester, and I wish I had just dropped the class. Sometimes it’s just not worth it. </p>
<p>Generally accurate, but a bunch of underachieving idiots gave my current art appreciation professor 5 stars. He does not deserve 5 stars. The dude barely teaches. I think he’s lectured a total of 30 minutes this entire semester. The rest of the time we watch movies on ugly pop art/graffiti…stuff of that nature, with tons of cussing, drugs, alcohol, and depressed people. They’re seriously depressing. While we watch movies, he fools around on the computer or works on personal art projects. The quizzes are ridiculously easy, straight out of the book/fill in the blank type questions. I’m extremely bored, extremely disgusted with course content, and I can’t even appreciate anything but street art after taking that class. I don’t even understand why he’s a professor. I could do his job. </p>
<p>Anyways, rant over, but moral of the story is, read the reviews, because if I had read the reviews, I could have figured out that the reviews were written by people who could care less about learning.</p>
<p>He probably has 5 stars because the class is easy.</p>
<p>I would have to say that for my school its very accurate but you should still be skeptical because you could have kids who are lazy and blame the professor for their bad grades and such. Another thing you have to worry about is the professors that read their own reviews and critique the course for the following year. It could be harder or easier. </p>
<p>i think it is the best site. I chose my statistics teacher because of that site and easily passed the class because the teacher was funny and had a fun way of explaining everything to understand. unfortunately my friend chose a different teacher and she was the worst because she gave so much work and barely explained really expecting people to come knowing everything. I often hear about people even at other colleges having a hard time with statistics but I was lucky to have the best teacher ever. i also got my psychology teacher from there and I have an A in the class so far with only my exams to take next week. I always go for teacher that people rate as having a great teaching style and actual discussion more than lecture.</p>
<p>@Shirleyxxy I love your profile picture. Spirited Away is my favorite movie. :)</p>
<p>In my experience it’s innacurate for math professors. I’ve had plenty of good experiences with professors with terrible scores submitted because the class was “hard”. </p>
<p>I agree with @southerncharm95 in that it’s more like “rate how easy the class is”. If it’s not a class that gives you an A for regurgitating the professors opinions on your essays or could pass for a mediocre high school class, it gets reviews about being “hard” or “the professor doesn’t care!!” </p>
<p>It’s not reliable at all. It’s completely self-selected; since students are not required to respond there is no way to control for selection bias. Whether it’s accurate is going to be based upon a student’s own perceptions of their experience with a professor</p>
<p>For example, that professor with 100 reviews and a 0.5 star rating. Let’s say that professor is a tenured associate professor with 15 years’ worth of teaching experience who teaches, let’s say, 3 classes per semester with about 30 students each (so a small LAC). In a single semester that professor may teach 90 students. In one year, 180 students. Over 15 years? That professor has taught nearly 3,000 students. If there are 100 ratings on RMP, you’re getting the opinions of less than 4% of the students that professor ever taught. This gets even smaller if you are going to a larger school where class sizes are bigger, say 50 or 70 students instead of just 30) or a school where professors teach more classes a year (like 7 or 8 as opposed to just 5 or 6).</p>
<p>Furthermore, you’re only getting the opinions of people who were motivated enough to post on RMP. And research shows that when people fill out voluntary things like that, it’s usually because they want to vent about some negative experience. I used to be an admin on RMP and I noticed that there were typically two types of evaluations on RMP: very positive and very negative. In general, unless it’s the general culture at your university to rate professors, people are only motivated go onto a site like RMP if they have a very negative experience or a positive one.</p>
<p>Honestly, what I felt was much more accurate than RMP was talking to students who had taken that professor’s class in the last semester or year. I was in a small department, so it was pretty easy to find people who had taken a class with a particular professor and get a variety of opinions about a professor.</p>
<p>The class they are teaching is important too. A lot of math profs here get bad reviews when they teach lower level classes since they teach it at too high of a level, but are great when teaching upper level classes. </p>
<p>In general, I think RateMyProfessors is like any other survey–i.e., the more ratings there are, the more accurate it is.</p>
<p>I think RateMyProfessors is really helpful as long as you keep its limitations in mind. It’s not really useful if there aren’t enough ratings for a trend to become visible. Reading reviews is more useful than just looking at the ratings. Sometimes you can tell you wouldn’t like a class even from good reviews: when I was picking a math teacher, I saw positive reviews which mentioned the the professor “is Christian and talks about being Christian.” I’m not Christian and I don’t see why I should hear about religion in a math class! So I took another prof. I also think it’s important to look at what class is being reviewed. I think you can usually tell if someone is rating a course badly just because it’s hard.</p>
<p>I’ve had some great results by picking teachers from RMP. I once had a choice between three identical speech classes in the exact same time slot, so I picked the professor that had lots of positive reviews, and they were totally accurate: he was tough, but so funny he could have been a stand up comedian. On the other hand, I had a history teacher I really disliked who got good reviews on RateMyProfessors… I think people liked that he talked about random stuff and not history, but I actually like history and had no interest in his personal life.</p>