Rate My Professor. Valid Source?

I love it and use it nearly as a bible, the key is knowing how to interpret certain gaps. For example, Science and Math or tech professors should probably get a curve as they get downrated for class difficulty reasons. Still the best will rise to the top. Also, a professors passion may be overwhelming to a non major so look into things like that but I used that as a 100% guide and think that it has attributed greatly to my 4.0 now in my 5th semester

It’s going to vary per the pool of RMP posters from any one college or major. My grad school published summaries of the written evals for UG classes/profs. Inherently flawed. One element is often kids rate according to their satisfaction with their own grade (anticipated or, in the case of RMP, received.) Gotta filter.

The comments are more useful than the quantitative ratings, and you should keep in mind that the people who post tend to be either very happy or very unhappy with the class. Also, there is research that professors can tweak the ratings (being attractive, young, native English speaker, having a dog all increases your ratings).

I actually went onto RMP and gave my opinion of the English teacher one of my sons had in college. I wrote that I felt that the concept of grammar was crucial to the study of English composition and that a syllabus which said: “Grammar and punctuation are less important than your feelings about what you are reading” should never be used in an English 102 class. In addition, this teacher required the students to have a Pinterest page and to use Twitter. My son refused to do either and failed the class, despite a 760 on the verbal SAT and having placed out of English 101. I was so furious that I trashed the teacher. I went back a few weeks later to check and mine was actually the nicest review! She was an adjunct and I have never seen her name on the department listings since then.

I have looked at RMP at our HS and the reviews seem pretty spot on for what I know about the teachers my kids have had.

Bingo.

Asking “How accurate is RMP” is akin to asking “How accurate is Parchment.” The users who post are very self-selecting. RMP might give you some directional information, but that’s about it.

V. quickly I want to dispel some of the myths about the power of both RMP and institutional evaluations.

Your kid refused to do the work, and therefore he failed the class.

The Twitter/Pinterest assignments sound super dumb, but if they were so terrible that your son felt he couldn’t complete them, then he had two options: 1) to switch to a different professor once he looked at the syllabus, or 2) to stay in the class and complete the dumb assignments. Since he decided to stay in the class once he looked at the syllabus, he was responsible for completing those assignments, full stop. College is as much about negotiating annoying responsibilities as it is about learning grand ideas. It’s not a perfect system, but that’s the way it is.

The adjunct professor wasn’t likely fired for bad RMP reviews. It’s possible that she wasn’t asked back due to institutional evaluations, but it’s just as likely that she found a better-paying job elsewhere or decided to go into government/private industry/another sector. It’s also possible that she was just teaching a class here or there to supplement her income or that she was a stay-at-home parent who just wanted to get out of the house a couple days a week. Adjuncting is not a permanent position and many people just do it to “tide them over” until they can find better work. Additionally, adjuncting does not pay very well, so it’s unsurprising that your adjunct professor isn’t going to have the same level of investment in the school and its students as a full-time tenured/tenure-track professor.

All of this is why I advise people to find out the percentage of undergraduate credit hours are taught by full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty vs. NTT or part-time faculty (percentage of credit hours actually taught to undergraduates, not percentage of full-time faculty employed by the school, since many full-time faculty barely teach in some places, or they teach mostly grad students). Ideally, you want to be at a school that actually invests money and resources in recruiting strong teachers rather than one that relies heavily on underpaid part-time labor.

TLDR: you really can’t draw any conclusions about this person’s employment trajectory just by looking at RMP.

And also, FWIW, a lot of English professors are now told they have to involve ~technology~ in their classrooms. It’s actually a requirement that many departments hold instructors to because it helps them seem ~relevant~ in a higher ed world where technology is king and reading/writing are considered a waste of Goldwater money. When English departments can say “100% of our classes involve a digital media component!” they can make a case that they deserve to be kept open. And “digital media” generally means anything from maintaining a blog to building a wiki. I wouldn’t be surprised if this professor was told she had to have a “digital media” exercise. In any case, talking to her about it would have been a better tack to take rather than refusing to do the assignments altogether.

Actually, this anecdote is a great example of why students should take RMP with a grain of salt. In addition to all of the other things people have already said - RMP has no way to verify that the person reviewing the professor was actually a student in the class. A parent’s perception (secondhand, filtered through the student, who has a vested interest in presenting himself as the wronged party) is not going to be an accurate take on the professor. Moreover, a parent’s gut feeling on what “should” be taught in the class shouldn’t necessarily be valued over the likely PhD-educated professor.

The fact that an angry parent can go on and “trash” a professor is a perfect reason not to trust these sites. They don’t have a process to vet the validity even of the person making the review.

Let’s take, for example, the assignments. We have no context about what the professor required the Pinterest and Twitter pages to do. Social media is a valid form of engagement - and writing - and there’s a right way to do it. Politicians and corporations use Twitter as a way to engage their constituents/customers. There are many ways to teach writing besides the traditional essay.

(Furthermore - this is tangentially related - I should hope that any college professor would value grammar and punctuation as less a part of the grade than analysis and synthesis. Critical engagement with the topic of the paper is FAR more important in a college-level English class.)

In my experience, RatemyProfessor is dead on. There are obviously a few students with personal grudges against the professors, but they’re easy to spot. My good professors had good ratings, my meh professors were in the 3 star range, and my terrible professors were in the 1.5 star range.

As others have said, RMP can be very hit or miss as the reviewers tend to be those with extremely strong feelings about the professor. I will add that some schools have their own, internal, course and professor evaluation system. At my school, students are required to fill out these surveys before they can see their grades. If your school - or the school you’re looking at - has such a system that you can access, I would highly recommend using that over RMP. The user base tends to be much less biased as almost every student participates and the comments tend to be much more constructive (the evals aren’t as freeform as a RMP review).

I approach RMP the same way I approach amazon. The people doing the review are not necessarily purchasers or customers, but they can review anyways. If there’s a significant amount of reviews, then I tend to trust RMP. I do agree that students complain more than they need to, but if literally every single review out of 20 is a complaint, then I think the teacher is doing something wrong and if I have an alternative I can take it. For example before I knew about RMP I took courses with people who made no effort to speak proper english (it was an immigrant from Africa) and if I saw RMP I’d have stayed away. It’s hard to trust based off of less than 3 reviews in my opinion though, and my favorite english teacher was not even reviewed when I first took her class.

For example, my favorite english teacher has 4.3 stars and 2.7 level of difficulty. More or less, this is accurate and all the reviews are good except for one which gave her a 2 star:

"what was really uncomfortable to work with this professor was that around the first few weeks of the class starting she thought it’d be a good idea to share with the class a miscarriage she had. This set a very low energy level in the class, including a lack of follow though on her end for students who require accommodations. highly inconsiderate. "

What a useless review.

I’ve noticed that some professors have high ratings in upper division courses, but low ratings in intro level courses. Keep this in mind if you are looking to major in a specific subject as a prof might be very passionate, but not know how to explain the introductory material well.

Agree. I’m somewhat irked (but unsurprised, considering the amount of helicopter parenting that goes on these days) that a parent would proudly proclaim here that they got on RMP to “trash” their kid’s professor when the kid made the conscious choice to not complete the class assignments, and when the parent herself had not set foot in the classroom and had not ever spoken to the professor in question. That seems not only immature but also a breach of internet ethics. I wish I knew who that professor was so that I could report that rating and have it taken down. If your kid chooses not to do the work and fulfill the expectations set forth in the the syllabus, that’s on him. The professor can’t do anything but fail a student who doesn’t do the work–even if the student in question has an amazing SAT score (seriously?).

The anecdote also brings up another point–that after the parent made her negative comment, more negative reviews appeared. This is actually very common for review sites. The first person to leave a review typically sets the tone for the reviews that follow. You often see a lot of reviews on RMP follow someone else’s lead. If one person gets on and trashes the professor, other students often feel emboldened to follow suit. The comments often feed off of and recycle one another as people come to some kind of consensus. And because students check RMP before they take a class, they walk into the classroom with a set of biases and preconceptions, and more often than not the professor then fulfills those expectations. If the consensus online is that the professor is “boring” or a “harsh grader,” then often times you’ll get even more students online complaining.

A professor friend of mine often tells the story of the time a bunch of people in his survey class failed the midterm. He didn’t know why that was–he’d given students a study guide and a review session–and there was no reason for them to have done so badly. Several weeks later he googled himself and found his RMP page where a few students from the previous semester had written that his midterm was a cakewalk and don’t bother studying. Well, they were wrong.

It had never occurred to me that parents might be rating the professor instead of the student. I do know that in the early days of RMP, it was considered fun times for faculty to give each other chili peppers.

But even crazier, there is a recent news story about a CA man who just killed his mother. The mother was a professor and the writer of the article went to RMP, found some comments about how the professor tended to be very critical of student writing, and then concluded that the mother’s critical nature could have been what her son was upset about.
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2016/12/matthew-salewske-murder-claudia-salewske-mother-death/

With some googling I was able, I think, to track down who I believe to be the professor that got “trashed” by the parent. She’s was indeed an adjunct but is now full-time, and she’s still teaching at the same university. (According to her online profile page, she left teaching temporarily to work in administration, which explains why she “disappeared” from the teaching schedule for a little while. But she didn’t get fired or dismissed from teaching.) Most of her RMP reviews have been extremely positive–as are the reviews at the university where she completed her graduate work. I also found the multimodal Pinterest page that she did for her class, and it actually looks pretty interesting and relevant to the course itself.

I’m obviously not going to link the RMP page here or the university where this person works. But it’s easy enough to find if you know where to look.

Word to the wise: don’t trash your kids’ profs on RMP and blab to the internet about it. And everyone else should just take RMP with the biggest grain of salt ever, as well as whatever “tall tales” people tell about their kids’ worst-ever profs.

I find RMP useful for course-specific objective information. Things like how many exams there are, how many essays, the average length of an essay, whether or not the professor uses a textbook, and so on. As others have already mentioned, RMP consists of students who have very strong feelings (positive or negative) so all the average, run of the mill experiences are absent. Subjective, affective things like “absolute love/hate this professor!” don’t mean nearly as much to me. I’ve taken a number of classes with professors that were supposedly brutal but they turned out to be great - people have very diverse expectations for a workload. What seems reasonable to me may be completely unreasonable to someone else - so when someone says something like “way too much work” without actually stating what the specific assignments were, I don’t really pay attention to it.

I’ve only posted on RMP once, and that was to write a review for a professor I had taken multiple classes with - I loved how organized and structured the courses were and I thought the professor was very engaging, so I figured I’d write a review. I was also motivated by the fact that this professor was new (so he didn’t have any reviews) and his department was very small - I figured my review would be important in motivating students to take a sort of “hidden gem” class in a department that not very many students even knew existed.

It varies. Reading the comments is much more helpful than the rating itself. Also, some professors will have on-campus reputations that you should pay attention to more than RMP.

For example, with one of my professors last semester, looking at his RMP page makes you think that he is terrible.

However, I and quite literally every person I’ve met who’s had him teach a class think that he’s overall a very good to excellent professor, and he has that reputation on campus.

Here’s my opinion about RMP: it’s a VERY biased source of information. I had a professor who likely had severe ADHD and absolutely could not organize a lecture. There were days where he’d use the entire class period and go on political rants and explain why voting Republican hurts America (this was a computer science class, mind you), or advertise his own meditation/mindfulness group to the students, or just random musings from his field of study (that have nothing to do with what we the students were learning). But he was an incredibly fair professor! He has very poor, angry ratings on RMP and most students did extremely poorly on the exams and usually did not take any notes whatsoever because lectures were just scattered all over the place, but looking at the grade distributions for that semester he gave As to 80% of the class. He was fair in letting us decide make corrections for almost full credit back. Only three people total got a D or an F. See if you can access some sort of grade distributions for the program. Those are the least biased source of information you can get.

@cameraphone my thought for the teacher you’re describing would be that how much did anyone actually learn about computer science in that class?

I think his bad rating is deserved, and I would have avoided it like the plague unless it was a philosophy or rhetoric class. Politics has no place in a computer science class.

So, you’re saying here that he was a fair professor because he gave such high grades? Even if they were unearned? I don’t know, that seems like the very definition of incompetence.

Well, this certainly drives home another aspect of online ratings (or even institutional evaluations): students confuse teaching quality and perceived “fairness” with the grade they received. A professor could be the worst professor of all time, but if students get high grades, they’re then inclined to rate a professor positively. Such a rating might have no connection to what they actually learned or how the class prepared them for the next class.

RMP has been my Holy Bible for my Freshman Year.