<p>I don’t trust it entirely. I’ve heard that people who typically leave reviews (hence, there aren’t hundreds but only a few each year) either: enjoyed the class and/or did very well OR failed/hated it.</p>
<p>So I look at the:
<p>Then I look at onlinen forum communities to see what people generally recommend</p>
<p>I’ve never had it fail. Every single time the professor has been as described. I’m at the point now where I refuse to register for professor’s who have negative or no reviews on the site. </p>
<p>Generally you should see 3 to 5 reviews as a minimum and toss outliers (i.e straight max or min scores with no description). Also pay attention to the dates, some professors may have undergone…changes…if there has been a long lag period since the last review.</p>
<p>From what my college friend said at Rutgers, some students purposely rate the teachers that are good “bad” because they want to get the teacher/class and so less people will sign up for the class and such.</p>
<p>gotmilk - that just proves that as soon as there is a ‘system’ people will figure out how to work it to their advantage, thanks for the morning chuckle.</p>
<p>OP - I have found that for my child’s experience, and my experience with guest speakers from the local U., RMP is pretty accurate. </p>
<p>For my daughter’s fall schedule we also subscribed to myedu.com to see stats on how many students dropped a class with a certain professor, what the grade distribution looked like for the class as a whole and compared to individual professors. </p>
<p>Sounds like you did yourself a favor by steering clear on this one.</p>
<p>I use ratemyprofessors.com and myedu.com together, and most of the time I found that most teachers correlated in terms of “easiness” and the percent of each letter grade given out. These sites are a big help, but they don’t beat asking for insight from past students who’ve taken these courses.</p>
<p>RMP and word of mouth have been good for me. So far I have completed 16 classes with 13 professors, all ranging from good to excellent. I am enrolled in 5 more classes now, three classes are with two professors I have never had before. Both seem very good so far.</p>
<p>There are occasionally wrong ratings, though. Like saying that a philosophy professor is a Communist because he teaches the theories of Karl Marx in addition to every other major philosopher. But those were flagged and deleted eventually, I believe.</p>
<p>I went to the link of the professor in question, and this doesn’t seem cut and dry. There are also some good ratings. However, I would personally try to avoid this professor. Unless one of my friends took him and had a good experience, as I tend to trust people I know more.</p>