These are not schools I am particularly interested in persay, however I have heard some schools (looking at you MIT and UC Berkley) have poor undergraduate teaching. Apparently, they are significantly more interested in their research then their undergrad students need for office hours. I have also heard that the professors at some of these institutions are poor communicators. The nail in the coffin was when I heard that UC Berkley allegedly has some CS classes that the lectures are only via videos.
I am going to paste some schools from the US News List accompanied by average professor rating, and general rating on rate my professor (obiously for the school in general and not the CS department)
(4.1/2.2)=(4.1 professor rating, 2.2 general rating)
A. Carnage Mellon (3.7/4.1)
B. MIT (3.9/3.5)
C. Stanford (3.9/4.2)
D. UC Berkley (3.8/4.1)
E. University of Illinois (3.7/4.2)
F. Cornell (3.8/4.3)
G. UW Seattle (3.6/4.1)
H. Georgia Tech (3.8/4.1)
If you know anything about what the professors for undergraduate CS classes are like at any of these schools. If you know enough could you order them by best undergraduate teaching, to worst undergraduate teaching?
Also I was wondering, how much can you trust the overall numerical rating from “ratemyprofessors.com”.
At any large research university, the professors are going to be - on average - more interested in their research than their undergraduates’ needs during office hours. That’s almost by definition of the position. Big research universities like Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford et al. hire professors to be researchers. They select PhD graduates with the best research records who can come, do groundbreaking research to bring recognition to the university and rake in million-dollar grants for that research. Those professors then have to do excellent research for 6-8 years so they get tenure. Even once they get tenure, many of these professors have to pay up to 80% of their own salary out of grants, so they have to spend a lot of time writing grants and then doing research so they can get more grants. They are not hired for good teaching, nor are they rewarded for spending time on teaching.
So even if they are good teachers (which many of them are!) and like teaching and working with undergrads (which many of them do), for the sake of their careers they are going to be more focused and spend more time on their research. Now, that’s not to say that you can’t find excellent undergraduate teaching and support at big research universities - some, like Rice, Brown, Princeton and other places, are known for being really good for undergraduates. (Actually, Stanford is known for having good undergraduate teaching.) And even many professors who are great researchers are really invested in student education and are great mentors and teachers. I’m simply saying that by definition their job is to be more focused on research than teaching.
If you want professors who are more invested in teaching undergrads than research, you want an LAC.
Also, do not go by Rate My Professors. There are so many things wrong with RMP; it’s not really a reliable source of information on the quality of undergrad teaching. For one, each professors’ rating is only from a tiny fraction of the students he or she has ever had, and is only students who are motivated enough to go to RMP to give a review. The students who are so motivated are usually students who had a negative experience for one reason or another. There’s also no way to know whether the student is giving a retaliatory low evaluation/rating because they are mad they got a bad grade because they didn’t do the work.
Due to the popularity of the CS major, expect classes to be large. The introductory CS course at UCB is over 1,000 students, and those at Stanford and Harvard are over 700 students.
Berkeley has an excellent computer science program and fantastic computer science professors. I’d gladly listen to Dan Garcia or Luca Trevisan on my computer screen and have future professors at top universities as my GSIs.
I wouldn’t take RateMyProfessors seriously and I don’t think the numbers are comparable across different schools. Students don’t always know what is best for them and may complain needlessly about professors assigning hard problem sets or grading harshly. Very few students post on RateMyProfessors and it isn’t a representative sample of the school as a whole.
I’ve taken about a dozen classes at Stanford, including a couple CS classes, and the professors I had ranged from slightly above average to fantastic. Most of the classes I took were graduate level, but many of those professors also taught at the undergraduate level.
There’s something about Stanford professors. They’re very enthusiastic about what they teach, and that seems to rub off on the students.
All schools have some great profs, some average profs, and some weak profs. Research universities are going to have profs that were hired for their research, not their communication and teaching abilities. Furthermore, many universities may have profs that might be fine instructors in their native tongues, but have heavy accents and are difficult to understand in an American classroom.
RatemyProfessor doesn’t tell you the whole story because disgruntled students often post. These may be students who missed classes or didn’t study and they’re blaming the prof for their poor grades. I would probably trust the favorable ratings more often than the unfavorable.