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<p>I can see where this stat would be pretty much useless to base a ranking on for so many reasons. For one thing, many schools have their own professor/class ranking system which is what the majority of students use rather than RateMyProfessor. Another is that people tend to be more willing to take the time to complain about something than to praise it. Students who get bad grades could be seeking revenge by giving the prof. a bad rating. So many possibilities. For such a random, subjective stat to have a strong influence seems crazy.</p>
<p>I agree with an earlier post. Accepted numbers are aspirational. Attending numbers (and the use of unweighted GPA numbers a’la the Common Data Set) are more realistic. </p>
<p>I also don’t have a problem with Rate My Professor. People don’t post information unless something not good happened to them or something really good happened to them. If there are a multitude of positive comments then most likely a whole bunch of people liked the prof for some reason. If there are a whole bunch of negative comments, well where there’s smoke there may very well be fire. Parse the comments and see if they are things that would of consideration to you. Positive or negative comments may not be important to one individual, but another individual may very well use that information when making a decision between one professor or another. Lots of service providers get commented upon including many professional people like doctors. It’s simply part of our big wide internet.</p>
<p>The issue with rating professors comes when students give professors low marks because they’re not easy. So a professor is penalized for actually doing his/her job. That’s very different from other rating systems for professionals.</p>
<p>The rankings that I have read seemed accurate as I could recognize the students from the reviews.
Why go to college if you expect it to be easy?
Seems a waste of time and money if you aren’t there to learn and that means a prof who has at least a moderately high bar.</p>
<p>Funny
“This is based on student evaluations from RateMyProfessor (15%), the largest site for professor ratings”. </p>
<p>My son had a teacher that was not so good. Many reviews indicated he was not so good. I saw 2 recent reviews that raved about the guy. I emailed Rate my professor to tell them that those 2 reviews were clearly being sarcastic. They should flag them as such. They didn’t, the “good” reviews are still there.</p>
<p>Since nothing happens in ones. I wonder how many other rankings are bogus on their site?</p>
<p>Im sure it depends on the school, but in many cases Id agree that people are more motivate to post to the extreme, rather than the " good- enough" professor.</p>
<p>Ive also noticed on other sites that host reviews, like Yelp, will pull reviews that are not positive. ( I noticed this after I posted several reviews that were " damming with faint praise" but IMO were fair and accurate, and they were pulled after a few weeks.)
Possibly because negative reviews are removed for businesses who pay for advertising?
<a href=“http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635[/url]”>http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635</a></p>
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<p>The reviews may be “hidden” and can be viewed by clicking on filtered reviews.</p>
<p>Why would Rate My Professor rankings be any more specious than USNWR peer rankings? They are all just opinion. At least with RMP reviews the students don’t benefit from being honest, whereas in USNWR there’s more back-scratching among schools in a certain perceived “club” of exclusivity or popularity.</p>
<p>^^ yes sally. I agree.</p>
<p>Thanks for the link. Despite being on cc for a few years, I had never heard of Pomona…</p>
<p>Pomona is one of the Claremont colleges, it is one of the schools in that consortium. You probably had heard of the other schools, not sure how it was singled out other than the fact that Claremont McKenna was disqualified per the other Forbes article. </p>
<p>[The</a> Claremont Colleges](<a href=“http://www.claremont.edu%5DThe”>http://www.claremont.edu)</p>
<p>Dad of 3, I am guessing you are from the east coast and do not pay attention to LACs.
I say this because not only does Pomona usually make the Forbes list but also USNWR top 5, I would think if you are a frequent visitor to CC you would have heard of it.</p>
<p>My daughter attends Pomona College and loves it. She was set on Amherst at first but after visiting both, Pomona was a much better fit for her. I cant say enough about the group of colleges that make up the consortium, great colleges, all of them. </p>
<p>They are a selective group but for anyone looking for some reach colleges, they are worth researching.</p>
<p>Pomona in fact is sometimes referred to as the Amherst (or Williams) of Calif: an LAC that attracts Ivy-caliber students.</p>
<p>It’s always good to expand one’s vision. Thank you lakemom for the link, and artrell, you score a 10 on your guess. Practically every LAC student who was a child of a family friend or one of the kids’ friends went to places like Amherst, Swarthmore, Haverford, etc. I’ll mention Pomona next time I run into someone who’s looking at the places I had mentioned. </p>
<p>I’ll display my ignorance again - what exactly is the significance of the consortium? I know someone who was interested in Harvey Mudd - how exactly would Pomona fit into this- is it typical that students dosemesters in different schools?</p>
<p>On the East coast, you have a 5 college consortium with Amherst, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke, Smith and UMass Amherst. The consortium allows student to take classes at the other colleges so it broadens their selection and exposure to others in different majors. </p>
<p>I would imagine the Claremont colleges offer the same opportunity. </p>
<p>The students do not swap schools different semesters, they stay at the own school but can attend the others.</p>
<p>The consortium is five colleges that share one physical campus space and some shared services (eg, health service, bookstores, some sports teams and clubs, etc.). The five campuses fit together sort of like lego blocks in one space that does not have any major/busy roads running between them. It takes less than 15 minutes to walk all the way across the five college campuses. Architecture varies a bit across the campuses. Each college has its own admissions, majors, professors, and graduation requirements. Students can easily cross register for classes at the other colleges, but the colleges have some limitations on this (certain number of credits have to be taken in their college). The total number of students is around 5,000 for the whole consortium. </p>
<p>I do not believe students typically do “semesters” at different schools. My D will be attending Mudd in fall. My guess is that of the 40 courses she will take in college, maybe 5 of them will be at another consortium college. Probably mostly visual arts courses for her. I would be surprised if it is more than a course a semester, and Mudd has such a rigorous core for the first 3 semesters that I bet she won’t do any at the other colleges freshman year. But she intends to join the fencing club and the Quiz Bowl team, both of which are shared with other consortium schools. And there are other kids from her high school class at Scripps and Pomona this fall, so I bet she will make some friends through them on the other campuses as well. Her high school is in Minnesota, so the consortium’s reputation has reached there.</p>
<p>There are a whole lot more LACs on the east coast than the west coast (I can name less than dozen on the west coast, but can reel off a lot more than that without taking a breath on the east coast). But Pomona is very well known to graduate schools and anyone who has looked at the rankings of top LACs.</p>
<p>My daughter has taken courses at some of the other colleges, especially if she wants a particular professor or a course that fits her schedule better. For the most part she does take most of her classes at Pomona.
However, what she does do on a daily basis is eat at the different dining halls. Each college has some awesome dining halls and she has her favorite menus at each and the meal plan can be used at all of them.</p>