<p>In a College ******* book on Smith I read that there are "two survey databases online where you can read reviews from former students" concerning professors. Does anyone know what and where these are?</p>
<p>I know one of them is ratemyprofessors.com. I forget what led me there but I was there for the first time the other night, asking D about some of the ratings. If her takes are accurate--and she could at least support her conclusions--a very positive rating is probably valid but a more modest rating isn't necessarily true. Number of data points varies quite a bit and profs who are "good but hard" get short changed.</p>
<p>The official Smith system for rating profs. ASPECTS, but unfortuantely you can only access it from an on-campus computer.</p>
<p>Yeah, ASPECTS can only be accessed by students, but is more reliable than ratemyprofessor, because only students who have actually studied with a particular prof can rate them. Don't trust RMP too much, anyone can comment on any prof and its pretty subjective. A better thing to try is to post a query about it in the Daily Jolt forum, you get a better cross section fo students that way.</p>
<p>I forgot about this when I posted my previous message, but there is an easy was for students and non-students to access the database from off campus -- just bypass the homepage and go directly to search. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.smith.edu/aspects/search/%5B/url%5D">http://www.smith.edu/aspects/search/</a></p>
<p>But even with ASPECTS, you have to be careful to consider how many respondents there are (listed in upper right hand conrner) and remember that sometimes only students who are really thrilled or unhappy with the class give extensive comments. The other thing is that not all of the responses get posted to the database -- I don't know why that is. I searched for a class that I took last Fall (Gov 201, Constitutional Interpretation) and there were 5 student responses out of 37 students in the class. I loved the class and the prof. I filled out the ASPECTS review form but my comments were not among the 5 listed.</p>
<p>The other caution I have about either RMP or ASPECTS is from personal experience. I read reviews for the above mentioned class before the Fall and almost didn't take it because of the comments. It turned out to be the best class I took all year.</p>