Rate My Professor. Valid Source?

so I have been really caught up by this website. University of cincinnati was always going to be my main choice for college because of there solid engineering program. But i came across the rate my professors website and decided to look what students had to say about their professors for the engineering field. I was so shocked by the large amount of negative reviews that it made me unsure about my potential decision. i was just wonder how accurate this website really is? Should i be using it as a resource or should i avoid it at all cost? could the students posting negative reviews be doing it for attention? or just the regular complaining student?
-thanks

Engineering is hard. Complaining is easy. People will blame everyone but themselves when they fail. Keep those three things in mind as you read sites like that.

If you like the school and if it’s been turning out good engineers, if your program is ABET accredited, and if it has a good-for-its-type graduation rate, that’s really all you need to know.

thanks for the reply! much appreciated!

You’re welcome…I should point out that engineering is hard but it’s also a ton of fun!

I was in college long before RMP or even the internet existed but there was a math prof who had a reputation for being mean and impossibly difficult. I had no choice but to take his class because of scheduling issues. An upperclassman heard me griping about it and took me aside to say that Prof X was awesome, that I’d learn more in his class than any other at the school, and that his gruff exterior could be punctured by simply going to office hours and chatting with him. Best advice I ever got.

It’s an English teacher, but one of the best teachers I’ve ever had was rated very poorly on that site just because he gave a lot of work.

I tend to be the nerd who asks teachers after class for more work (especially math and physics) just so i can practice. Hopefully i will be able to manage the workload in college…thanks for the reply!

haha thats awesome! so far i tend to try and bond with my teachers in my highschool and i hope i will do the same in college. thanks for the advice!

My kids felt that Rate My Professors was hit and miss in terms of accuracy. Sometimes the comments were valid and sometimes it became a magnet for disgruntled students to vent.

I found it very helpful when selecting specific classes, but not useful when selecting universities.

I feel that people who tend to go on to any website and write a review tend to have very strong feelings for or very strong feelings against. The people in the middle never write reviews and these are probably the majority. So, I look at both extremes and then feel the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

RMP is really a toss-up. There’s this one teacher at my high school that also teaches at our state school. He has a terrible reputation in the school, but his RMP rating is nearly a perfect 5.0 with over 15 reviews

It’s fairly accurate. Chances are, a 4.5+ prof is going to be quality, and a 2.0- prof is going to have some issues that other students have identified.

Also, it’s easy to read between the lines of the reviews. Eg, if a prof is only a 3.0, but most of the complaints are against “too much reading/homework” or other petty things rather than the quality of their teaching, then you are able to derive the conclusion that they may be challenging, but fair.

You have to be able to identify “sour grapes” from legitimate gripes. I’d say a pattern of complaints could be valid. My kids do use it. Sometimes they would pick sections at unpopular times so they could get in with the profs with the best reviews. It was worth it to them.

What I do is at the end of the semester, I go back and look at the professors I had and reread their reviews and compare them to my experiences. My one math professor, whom I thought was really good, had terrible reviews. It truly is a toss-up. You may read reviews from students who didn’t put in the required amount of effort; therefore, the reviews are a little skewed.

Some students will say the professor was hard, but in reality, the professor was probably expecting college-level work, but some students weren’t ready for it. I have found RMP useful, but you can’t be naive about it.

It’s a form of social media, for heaven’s sake. Sometimes valid, sure. But there are better ways to research a college.

@barksdale nailed it. Very highs and very low ratings are usually pretty telling. There are things that are valid and important to you that can be garnered from some reviews. My D uses it pretty successfully, but knows how to pick through the relevant information. If they are hard to understand iin terms of their English, how good they are at explaining concepts, if they are supportive and available for office hours, that kind of thing. You can tell when a teacher is really hard but also very good. That stuff has been pretty reliable. Amount of workload is relative to what you are used to and how prepared you are when you enter the class, so you can’t always rely on someone else’s perspective. But certainly, I wouldn’t use it before I got to a college, just once there when doing schedules. Some schools have their own rating site as well. There is good and bad everywhere.

I’ve found that there’s always a disparity in the quality of teaching among departments. Unfortunately, some universities offer far too much latitude to professors in how they conduct a course. You will have absolutely horrible professors. The challenge is how you handle it - finding a strategy that works. In engineering its critical. In my experience either tenure, or brand spankin new teachers are the ones to watch out for. One doesn’t care, the other doesn’t know.

I look at my schools ratings and they pretty accurate.

My son uses RMP mainly to watch for trends with a particular professor. I tend to agree with the other posts. RMP can be interesting and informative but take it with a grain of salt.

As a parent who is back in college, I have found the RMP website to be fairly accurate for my major. The important thing isn’t just the numbers, though. It’s the actual gripes/bennies that people are posting.

One professor is ranked really highly, but it’s because the student body finds him “smoking hot”. He’s an ok teacher.

One professor is ranked highly, and it’s because he’s just really, really good at teaching the course that he teaches (graphic design). The feedback reflects that.

I wish I’d found RMP before I’d taken a class with professor of art history who turned out to have the critical thinking skills of a turnip. I’ll be avoiding her this semester-it took all my adulting abilities to make it out of that class with my 4.0 intact…

So yeah, I’d say that RMP definitely does paint a picture, if only to let you know that there are a lot of kids at the school you’re looking at who had expectations that were really different in some way than the reality of the experience.

@adelcimm for fun I looked at RMP for U Cinn for Engineering. Over half of the 181 professors in engineering got the green happy faces. In my opinion, that’s pretty good, and should give you a fairly good pool of teachers to pick from to provide a quality experience.

Most of the red unhappy face profs have one rating, which isn’t enough to form an opinion about. The lowest ranked prof with more than 1 ranking is at 1.3 with nine ratings. From reading the ratings, the bad rating is merited.

28 professors have the unhappy red face with more than one rating. That doesn’t seem like it’s indicative of a problem with the department-that looks like what I experience at work, lol. Lots of good people, some phoning it in, and a few bad apples.