<p>Colleges</a> With The Best Professors: RateMyProfessors.com 2013 Ranking</p>
<p>I’ve never regarded RateMyProfessors.com as a particularly credible source since the ratings typically come from a low number of self-selected students. It is nonetheless interesting to note that 5 of the top 10 “colleges with the best professors” by this (somewhat dubious) metric are large public universities: #3 Penn State, #5 Wisconsin, #6 Georgia, #9 Texas A&M, and #10 Michigan. </p>
<p>No Ivies in the top 10, and the only Ivy to crack the top 17 is Cornell at #17.</p>
<p>Many schools have their own heavily-used internal ranking systems, so students have no reason to go to ratemyprofessor. This is the case with both of the Ivies my S has attended: Columbia and Dartmouth.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure “easiness” is part of the students’ criteria when ranking their profs. Not the best metric to include for quality.</p>
<p>That picture of U Wisc. with people slogging across a field in a blizzard while holding umbrellas would sure stop me from applying no matter how highly rated the professors. What were they thinking.</p>
<p>If that had been a blizzard umbrellas wouldn’t have done much good. It’s just a little snow!</p>
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<p>No surprise there. Larger schools have more professors and thus are more likely to have some who are highly rated. There is no reason whatsoever that logic would dictate the Ivies to have better rated professors. Even if we assume these people are smarter and more knowledgeable than the professors at other schools, that has nothing to do with their ability to teach. In fact, I would guess these people disdain teaching undergraduates as being beneath them.</p>
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<p>Easiness is actually part of the criteria used by Ratemyprofessors, but as I read the comments, most of the students rate those professors highest who have the ability to best teach the subject matter in a way the students actually understand.</p>
<p>Maybe you should look at Princeton rankings.</p>
<p>That’s actually interesting, because there are several places w/school wide averages (as listed by rmp) higher than many of these schools. My alma mater is one (3.88 to Duke’s 3.79), however, some schools such as mine have significantly lower contributions because we had an internal system (called class comments). Also, the rankings are too volatile to be trusted. Does anyone seriously think that Duke suddenly just hired great professors since last year? Or that suddenly opinions of certain folks improved dramatically?</p>
<p>^ Yes, apparently in compiling the “best schools,” ratemyprofessor.com only considers the professors at each school who have ratings from at least 30 students. So although Harvard’s overall average is 3.84, which is higher than almost all the schools that made the top 17, very few Harvard professors are rates by as many as 30 students, consequently only a tiny fraction of Harvard’s professors count toward the “top schools” ranking. Apparently those who were rated by as many as 30 students had lower ratings.</p>
<p>But this is also true at larger schools. At #10 Michigan, for example, just on the first page of 131 pages of faculty ratings, only 2 of 20 professors are rated by 30 or more students. If that ratio holds, then Michigan’s school ranking is based on ratings of only 10% of its faculty who have any rating at all (which of course could be less than the entire faculty, because some professors might not be rated at all).</p>
<p>But it’s dam<em>ed if you do, dam</em>ed if you don’t. It’s silly to include ratings of professors based on only one or two student ratings. But it’s also silly to include ratings of schools based on ratings of only 10% or less of the faculty. Bottom line, there are just too few ratings of too few professors at all schools, and they’re all self-selected and must be assumed to be unrepresentative. This is just completely unreliable nonsense.</p>
<p>Yeah, one of my professors (organic chemistry) actually has very high ratings on there, but has less than 30. Another very popular organic chemistry professor has like 3 times the amount and is rated slightly higher (both 4.5+ despite being of quite high difficulty, in fact many profs. at Emory who are of high difficulty, as in below 2.5 on the rmp scale get solid ratings, which I consider 3.5+). Ironically, the fact is also that at any given time, the other teacher teaches like 3 times (160-180 vs. 45-60) as many students, so smaller, high quality courses will be less represented and will probably not make the cutoff. The ranking is more valid for professors who have been around for a long time or who have larger class sizes and teach well. This may be primarily ranking just that, which schools are likely to provide the best large lecture teachers.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t rely on these sources very much. It’s easy to create bias within these ranking systems due to a select population or the factors in which it is being graded, so take this with a grain of salt, I guess? Besides, I would say that what is classified as “good” for someone maybe be in fact judged differently with someone else.</p>
<p>These ratings have no credibility whatsoever. It’s a popularity contest. I wonder what the correlation is between ratings and the grade you receive from the professor. A professor is bound to disappoint some students. A professor has to make demands and enforce standards. The best professors would receive ratings that are somewhere in the middle. Students generally don’t like to work hard and only a few appreciate a professor who is task-oriented, who actually lectures on the subject, and who has high expectations. My guess is that classes are more popular where students can chat and joke around. Too bad these ratings receive any notice at all.</p>
<p>Also, imagine the courses where the teachers don’t actually lecture at all (or do less of it), but do more active learning instead (and I don’t mean clickers…I mean discussion oriented, pbl, cbl, tbl, etc). This is okay in social sciences and humanities, but research typically shows that active learning will usually lower ratings of say, a science professor employing it, perhaps because of the reason you cite. The student now has to actually work and take responsibility for the material (come prepared for discussion, or risk being exposed as sub-par or underprepped) instead of being spoon-fed material and then going home to think about it only after the session. Also, there are effective things for more engaging lecturers/teachers like the Socratic method that many students don’t like; such students consider the teacher mean for putting them on the spot. This wouldn’t be a problem if they actually studied frequently for the course. But honestly, a significant portion of the students in such a course will only study when an exam or quiz is around the corner. So being “put on the spot” is more like “being caught off guard”; The professor is considered being mean because they are actually expecting students to keep up with the material and holding them responsible for it in front of peers. Needless to say, this will lower ratings. Apparently, it is better to be amazing at “delivering” material and then only challenging students outside of class, as opposed to challenging students both in and outside of class. That’s at least what student evaluations suggest Ironically things like examination outcomes say otherwise. Active learning has been shown, in several cases to improve outcome on higher-level exam prompts. However, to get high ratings, you give students what they want and not what they need. A student with an amazing lecturer will at least feel like they are learning a lot even if they can’t do well on an exam with difficult questions. This is actually the case with the popular professor I described. He is great at delivering material and will employ a soft version of socratic method, and the students feel like they learn a lot, however most of them, on an exam, could not do questions beyond those requiring basic understanding/memorization of lecture notes which usually resulted in a grade below 70%. Averages were typically between 60-70. </p>
<p>The way we, as students, evaluate teachers is really interesting to say the least…</p>
<p>A good rating system might be based on standard pre-tests and post-tests to see how much students learn. That is the real criterion for judging teaching effectiveness. Every professor teaching a particular subject would give the same pre-tests and post-tests. This would also permit faculty to identify the most effective teaching practices and improve over time. Didactic approaches (e.g. Direct Instruction) have been shown to be most effective by past research. </p>
<p>And, to whom is the college accountable? The student or their parents (who pay the bills)? College faculty should try to provide the type of instruction that best meets parents’ expectations. Parents could be surveyed…but they would probably want to know the results of the pre-test/post-test research. I imagine they would want faculty to use the methods through which their child would learn the most.</p>
<p>But it doesn’t make it because student contribution isn’t high enough. That’s why quite a few large public schools are on the list. It also explains the absence of LACs.</p>
<p>Northwestern, like the Ivies, has a heavily-used internal rating system. The results of student evaluation for EVERY course are available to the students. It shows not only the average scores but also detailed comments from the students. That’s the main reason why the contribution is low for Northwestern. There’s no reason to go to RateMyProfessor. Those with high contribution probably don’t have such internal system available to students. So the irony is this list just rewards those schools.</p>
<p>All of these measure primarily how well a student is entertained not how well they are educated. As a result, they’re fairly worthless other than as fodder for CC.</p>
<p>Please, please, this rankings are meaningless. </p>
<p>Rate my professor reviews are not representative. Schools have internal evaluations, which are usually not correlated with RMP rankings. This is because the only people to go to RMP are those that either hate the professor or adore him/her.</p>
<p>Also, many professors are not in RMP. For example, from the department where I teach, only around 1/3 of professors have rankings in RMP. </p>
<p>Furthermore, a professor who gives everyone an A is going to get the best reviews, regardless of whether the students learned or not.</p>
<p>I like Collegehelp’s idea. Measure the learning. </p>
<p>As for Rate My Professor: the STEM professors almost always have lower ratings than professors of more “fun” subjects. My son was dismayed that he had to take a higher level math class from a professor with low ratings - only to find that the professor was perfectly good at explaining concepts and working with students. Apparently he just got low ratings because he taught a difficult subject. Son has found that if the professor has excellent ratings then he/she probably is an excellent teacher, but low ratings often don’t mean much, a few sour grapes can spoil a good teacher’s rating. A subject that is just tough by nature is going to inspire a lot more nasty comments from students who are disappointed with their grades.</p>
<p>And the internal valuations are typically based on student evaluations.</p>
<p>I do not believe most students at decent colleges are going to rate some easy A prof highly. Most are smarter than that and have better values. Easy As get little respect and are never loved like tougher but fair good profs.</p>