RateMyProfessors.com is a website – now owned by MTV – that fills a strange space in the mindset of the academic community. At its best, it is a forum for students to honestly and anonymously evaluate their Professors. At its worst, it is a place for gossip, ridicule, and a tool to choose the path of least resistance on your way to a degree.
At my university, RateMyProfessor is often seen alt-tabbed in another window next to the University’s class selector software, students fervently cross-referencing available classes with their assigned professors . It’s not uncommon for students – faced with a large set of potential electives – to use RMP to choose their class solely on the ratings of the teachers found there. This is not neccessarily a bad thing at all – all other things equal, I can understand the willingness to choose a teacher that your peers have considered to be a better educator, or at least one that falls into line more with your particular style.
This, sadly, is not always the case. Two metrics by which professors are graded – “Easiness” and “Hotness”, the latter giving the professor a chili pepper next to their name – seem counterproductive and wholly immature. I’m not sure any professor would see being considered “easy” a good thing, and encouraging students to comment on their professor’s physical attractiveness is inappropriate (Van Halen notwithstanding).
Ultimately, RateMyProfessors.com walks tediously on that line between useful tool and immature annoyance. A quick survey of other ProfHacker contributors (all professors) tells me that RMP is mostly ignored by faculty, which is a shame – but understandable. I can imagine a tool similar to RMP becoming an honestly useful thing: just take out some of the more strange bits, maintain anonymity while asking students to register so that comments can not be spammed, etc – a little less JuicyCampus, in other words. It could be a much more useful tool for faculty if it shaped up, assisting both students in choosing classes, as well as Professors in evaluation. In the meantime, we should not necessarily rail against the tool, strange as it is.
Do you have any stories of Faculty or Student using RateMyProfessors.com? Do you find it a useful tool, or an annoyance? How would you change it?
43 Comments
I would put RMP out of business by publishing the results of the university administered teacher-course evaluations. Publishing this data should be quite easy. For those worried about privacy issues, I have been lead to believe that this data is subject to FOIA for state schools, however I am not a lawyer and cannot verify this.
I don’t know if it’s FOIA-able or not. There’s probably some variance, depending on how institutions set up evaluations (or “student opinion surveys”).
That said, publishing the official ones would be nice, in that you’d capture a fuller range of data. The main drawback would be that the comments on written evaluations are often local and technical: “This assignment didn’t work, but if you did this it would be better.” Maybe just statistical averages?
Rate my Professor has always struck me as a perfect example of what students expect from a class often runs exactly counter to that of the instructor. What is really being measured on RMP is what makes a class bearable or an instructor interesting to undergraduates, and although we teachers wish that the metric for student class choice was the quality of instruction it never has been, nor will it ever be. Every objection I have ever heard about RMP has hinged upon the objection that it isn’t the right way to measure the ‘actual’ quality of a class or the instructor (and why is everyone so peeved about that chili pepper?). Students are smarter in their choices than we often give them credit for, and for those of you who have forgotten falling asleep in Bio lecture after an all night cram session try to remember how irrelevant or downright BAD most classes seem to be to undergrads. Taking that into account, a student enrolling in a class because someone thought the class was fun or easy is a rational choice. The downside to RMP is that it tends to become a platform for the extremes, the guy that crushed on his TA or the slacker that showed for one class and hates you because he failed, rather than an comprehensive survey of student evaluations. I, for one, let my students know I read those reviews and not only do I get more reviews that way but they tend (from my perspective) to be more thoughtful and balanced.
What I would LOVE to read is how someone out there learned from their student evaluations on RMP, and turned a class around. I would, but all my reviews have been stellar.
In some cases, I think the reviews are rather accurate. When one prof in the department has 33 reviews while the others have 3 or 4, I’d probably let that prof’s reviews guide my decision about whether or not to take the course.
I have and continue to use this site. The comments are pretty accurate.
The comment the author makes is way off base and inaccurate. “Two metrics by which professors are graded – “Easiness” and “Hotness”…” . I know several students, myself included, tend to rate a professor by what was learned from the cousre and how we exchanged our ideas. Seems like the author uses this site for the wrong reasons.
Liz, I believe Alex was referring to two of the five metrics by which a student can rate a professor through the RMP service (that are then displayed on the results page — there are a few other metrics such as textbook use which are not displayed to the end user). Those 5 are: Easiness, Helpfulness, Clarity, Rater Interest (in the class), and Hotness. RMP will not allow a user to leave a response unless E,H,C,RI are rated, although Hotness is optional.
As for myself, I was an early adopter of RMP because I was doing a second BA at SJSU when RMP was created by a couple of SJSU students. IOW, students at SJSU used it a lot so there was already a good chunk of data in there, thus it was useful — especially in the Business department, which worked out for me since that’s where I was taking classes.
Having been on both sides — as a student picking classes and as an instructor w/ ratings at 3 diff schools — I agree with the statement upthread that RMP is a “platform for the extremes”. When I was a student, I looked for the sad-face and stayed away. I read the neutral-face comments and tried to figure out which were left by disgruntled students and which were not. I almost always ignored the happy-face comments because often they weren’t useful. I’ve only ever left comments myself when a professor was truly horrible BUT the RMP comments were so poorly written I figured they’d lose their usefulness (and students really needed to stay away from that guy — it was ridiculous). And I’ve also only ever left comments for undergrad classes. It just seems weird to leave RMP comments for grad courses when you personally know every person who would be signing up for them. I mean, just tell ‘em.
As an instructor, I only have a few from each place I’ve taught, and they’re positive, and so are my actual course evals. I don’t pay any mind to them at all (although I looked at them since Alex mentioned the whole thing), but I think it’s really funny the ones that say I’m easy. I find that really funny, since I’m actually not at all.
I guess this is just a really long-winded way of saying I don’t much care either way anymore, since I’m not picking classes. Would I advise a student against looking up a prof they know nothing about? No, but I’d tell them to read carefully and take some things into consideration, such as the “platform for the extremes”.
I’ve noticed that anytime I teach a majors’ course (i.e. one that focuses on methods and doesn’t just teach the interesting time period), I take a hit in RMP ratings. So do all but one of my colleagues. If we could figure out what that one does differently from all of us, that’d be a useful lesson to take away from RMP but the mystery continues to elude us for many years running.
My identical twin sister gets a chili pepper, I get nadda. What gives?
Seriously, this site is useless. I much prefer RateMyStudents.
P.S. That should be Rate Your Students: http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/
I absolutely despise Rate Your Students. Ever since they posted that one entry last year where the faculty member was wishing that a particularly disruptive student would get raped, and when I complained to the editors they told me that the comment was justified since it arose out of “real anger” (meaning that rape is okay if the anger is justified?), I just can’t even go there anymore. Rate My Professors makes me role my eyes. Rate Your Students makes me sick to my stomach.
I agree with you, Nels. I don’t see any value (to anyone) for disparaging students as they do on that site. We all get annoyed by immature behavior or outlandishly bad behavior, but there is no need to wish harm on students or laugh at them in a meanspirited manner.
I agree. There are actually many articles on Rate Your Students that support rape and violence against students. It’s a common thread. I wish there was a way to shut the sight down. Most of the people who write there are cowards, and it’s a terrible thing that they are doing.
I don’t know what articles you read on Rate Your Students, but there is NO laughing going on over there. The correspondents who write the posts are at the end of their tether…
That’s not funny.
My second-hand understanding is that research on student evaluations shows them to be largely unreliable measures of anything besides popularity–which is nice to have but not in itself a measure of teaching effectiveness. Perhaps ProfHacker can call in some people with actual expertise on this question, especially if there’s interest in publicly posting the supposedly more authoritative classroom results (I’ve heard administrators at my own uni airing this idea). Anecdotally and from browsing, it does seem to be the case that at RMP in particular, the love/hate extremes are better represented than any kind of thoughtful middle. I have always considered the chili pepper option degrading to everyone involved, and the “easiness” button certainly suggests that RMP is not intended as a serious platform for thoughtful evaluation but for a quick check geared to those who want to get through as, well, easily as possible.
My second-hand understanding is that research on student evaluations shows them to be largely unreliable measures of anything besides popularity
I’ve been hearing people say this for years, but I’ve never actually seen someone refer to any published research on the question. However, I think you bring up a good point: We should be concerned with whether or not our teaching is effective, so the tools by which we evaluate our effectiveness should be reliable. Should student evaluations be the only tool used (by ourselves, by our colleagues, by our students)? No. So what are the other tools we all can rely on?
If Students knew anything, they would be Professors.
Only if there are no other choices of identity besides “student” or “professor.”
Granted.
I would have more respect for student ratings of their professors if the ratings were taken a semester after the class being rated. I don’t think the final week of class (right before the final exam) is a good time for the student to reflect on how much they have learned and really gotten from the class. Midway through the following semester, have they retained anything they learned previously? Have they put into practice any of the new tools they were supposed to have acquired in the previous class?
That is the type of eval that I think would be useful.
In answer to my own question: for many of us, it’s a good idea to get peers to observe your teaching and write up letters of review for your file, and to do this fairly often.
There’s a good summary of the research (with references) at http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/sef.htm
The research shows the opposite — that students are really pretty at evaluating the quality of instruction.
What this thread has missed so far is that RMP is invalid because of its non-random sample selection.
If a school publishes its official student eval results, that would be a highly reliable resource for students. There is no good reason why schools don’t publish their results. At state schools it’s public data, and the public has a right to see it.
Thomas, do you have some references for those of us interested in following up on that research?
And, yes, a serious problem with RMP is that it represents a “non-random sample selection,” something that Alger pointed out upthread with his discussion of the “extremes.”
Thomas and George– I work for a state university, and our state legislature passed a bill that stated that we (faculty at state institutions) must post their evals online … and I can’t tell you by when, but in the next year or so. We have had a lot of conversation about this, and the consensus I’m understanding so far is that most people don’t mind the numerical / aggregated scores being posted . . . it’s the comments– comments that can be inflammatory and mean– that won’t be posted. The evaluation instrument must change, though, at my institution, but probably at many other institutions, too. We aren’t asking appropriate questions about students’ response to teaching.
Well, I don’t like RMP because I had a student make inappropriate comments about my body on it and I flagged the comment as inappropriate… and that was a year ago. When you open the door for students to comment on your “hotness” you open it up to a lot of misogyny.
Some schools do publish their course evaluation data on the university website. The place where I went to grad school did this for all undergrad courses. They published the average scores to the five core questions as well as any student comments that had been written in a box that was specifically designated for comments to be published to the web. The evaluations were only accessible with a university login, but they were linked right there within the course-selection interface.
I’d be interested to know whether this policy has meant that this institution sees lower traffic on RMP.
The comments on my RMP profile are so diverse that I can’t imagine that anyone could make much sense of them. Among other things, I’ve been given ratings for courses that I’ve never taught, and for courses that I supposedly taught when I was away from campus on sabbatical leave. Some students complain that I’m an incredibly angry person, while others object strongly to that characterization and say that I’m a very caring professor. About the only things that they agree on are that I assign a lot of work and am not overly generous with grades. Since I actually expect my undergraduate students to attend class and turn in homework, I guess that’s a fair characterization. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably better off not having to deal with students who don’t want to take my classes because I expect them to actually come to class and do homework.
Commenters on this particular post might also be interested in this August ProfHacker post (by Brian Croxall) as well as the ensuing conversation; many of the same issues were raised then:
“Short-circuiting RateMyProfessor“
Hmm…after all this discussion, I decided to check my ratings, just out of curiosity. I’ve been here since the fall of 2004, and I have all of two ratings. Actually, a quick glance indicates that no faculty member at my institution has more than 19 ratings–and that includes people who’ve been here a couple of decades.
Apparently students here just don’t use RMP much. Of course, we’re a small college (a little more than 1600 students), so information probably passes by word of mouth.
I found the same thing for several schools. I had thought RMP was all but dead in the water as far as students are concerned.
Interestingly, I’ve heard students say that have “secret” sites on MySpace and Facebook that give more info than RMP, and the students deem these other sites more reliable. But this is urban lore…. I have no proof.
They’re not really secret — in Facebook there are several different apps (one being a RMP app) that aggregates data from external sites and also allows additional comments internal to the app community on Facebook.
Yeah, the only reason I joined MySpace was to get access to theirs, and it had less information on me than RMP did, but I can’t remember my MySpace username now, so I can’t find it again or I’d tell what it is.
They discontinued the MySpace App.
Rate My Professors is relatively old, but I just stumbled across it before this article was posted.
It’s true the ratings are often superficial and ultimately not effective for actual course evaluation. I’m actually a little irritated with the out-of-hand rejection of this site that seems to be the theme of most our replies. I think we need to step back as teachers and look at it from a different perspective for a moment.
You all remember crappy classes and having to cram for tests in subjects you didn’t care about right?
We all want to evaluate our pedagogical style with “real and meaningful” feedback and statistics. At the end of it all, we need whatever feedback we can get.
Rate My Professor gives students a place to say the things they might feel constrained when saying even in anonymous in-school reviews. True, some of these things are rather rude or entirely inappropriate, but they are I think more true. If you have a student in a “safe” academic environment talk about you, then have the same student talk to his friends about you, his friends are going to get information and opinions that our reviewer didn’t. Fortunately, FMP seems be used by students who want to give honest reviews (with some exceptions or pissed off kids).
/start rant-example thing…
Working with the English dept. I can attest to the number of teachers who struggle to convey lessons to students who just don’t care. They just don’t see how anyone could be so bored with their beloved 14th century French texts. And despite how important we feel our subject matter is, often students disagree, especially if it’s a “core” class the University is forcing freshman to take. I certainly didn’t (and still don’t) give a damn about biology. Maybe we can take this more candid, brutally honest, and superficial (which can be helpful too- “it was boring” can mean we should give out lectures some pizazz) suggestions to improve the way we teach. If students on RMP say the material is boring and out dated- despite how great you think it is- it might be worth thinking at least about how you present it. We have a teacher who thinks that showing kids how to make avatars is cutting edge (hell, this site attaches to my gravitar account automatically, can I have 3 upper division credits now?), and her reviews read almost uniformly “disappointing and outdated, she barely understands what she’s doing”, “scatter brained and uninformed”, “boring”, “out of touch”, etc. We can dismiss bad reviews from an MTV hosted site because we don’t like them, because they say we’re boring, or because they seem to emphasis some kind of “hipness” we don’t get, or we can take them at face value- after all, other prospective students will. It might even help us put some fun in learning, use a little MTV hip to spruce up some boring material.
/end easily dismissible quickly written rant/argument thing
Final thought: As far as the hotness thing goes, that’s a bit silly, but frankly, if you’re skin is that thin, why are you teaching often immature young adults just enjoying their first taste of self-governed responsibility and life rule? God knows my chunky ass won’t be getting any chilies, but there’s only one person who’s opinion of my flab matters to me, and she’s not an 18 year old post-pubescent child. ‘Nough said.
I now know of two separate incidents in which students used RateMyProfessor to conduct campaigns of terror against faculty members who had given them poor grades or otherwise disciplined them. This included inciting other students to write negative reviews of the professor, making violent suggestions on the page, etc. Although the operators of the site deleted posts that suggested one of these professors be sexually assaulted, they did not delete generically negative posts because it could not be proven that they were part of this terror campaign. All of this was very stressful for the people involved, and took up a lot of their time. As far as I am concerned, I pay attention to student evaluations conducted by the university when they show important patterns or make valuable or helpful suggestions, but not to internet slam campaigns, which RateMyProfessor seems to invite.
I must admit to ignoring RMP, and only skimming my official evaluations. They all say pretty much the same thing at this point – students like me, but think I’m a hard grader and that I ask them to do too much reading and that I don’t return their graded work quickly enough, and they split pretty evenly between those who think there’s too much lecture and those who think there’s too much discussion. I don’t have any major incentives to change the way I teach, so for me reviewing evals is more to see what my supervisor would see if she’s thinking about hiring me for another year. I keep getting hired, so I assume I’m okay.
If this sounds indifferent and apathetic, well, there’s a bit of that, yes. I burn enough mental and physical energy just dealing with the day-to-day problems that crop up among my students without worrying about whether they like me or find my lectures entertaining. I don’t go out of my way to be boring, if only because such lectures are tedious to write, but to be honest, I’m not going to add to my already stressful workload in order to add the sorts of bells and whistles that make jaded or reluctant students happy.
I get a much better sense of how a class is progressing from the students’ work, and from their forum postings, than I do from evaluations – and there I can adjust the course in real time to meet their needs. End of course evaluations are not all that helpful to me, so I can’t imagine that the RMP evaluations would be any more so.
Plus there’s the mental sanity factor of avoiding that site. Do I really want to read about students’ opinions on my appearance, hot or not? No.
So I don’t really care about RMP one way or another – either students will want or need to take my classes, or they won’t – their having pre-conceived notions about me isn’t anything I can change, so why worry about it?
Rana, I second every thing you said in this post- spot on!
Those who are interested in research about RMP might find this article interesting:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a794083436
E-Valuating Learning: Rate My Professors and Public Rhetorics of Pedagogy Kelly Ritter Rhetoric Review, Volume 27, Issue 3 July 2008 , pages 259 – 280
Abstract The Rate My Professors (RMP) online student discourse community shapes and defines current public rhetorics of pedagogy. RMP is a cultural phenomenon indicative of a larger movement in extra-institutional discourse toward ranking and assessing people and products. More important than the postings on RMP, however, or their measurable accuracy, is how RMP reflects the increasingly convergent interests of consumer culture and academic culture, shaping the ways that pedagogy is valued and assessed by students within the public domain. Faculty therefore must consider RMP’s effect on public discourse about pedagogy in order to help students understand evaluation as a tool for civic exchange.
@Nels — I haven’t read RYS in awhile — and now that I’ve seen the posts you mentioned, I won’t be reading it again!
@Terry Porter, I think my actually reply to you was erased because the threaded comment ran out of room, but whether meant as a joke or meant to be serious, it is inappropriate to wish that annoying students be gangraped in prison.
http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2008/03/superkeeners-are-probably-annoying-but.html
Actually, I’d be more disturbed to think of this faculty member really, really hoping that this student be gangraped rather than joking about it. At the end of your tether or not, such comments are wrong. And slimy.
I have a few online reviews, mainly negative — “boring”, “tests were 2 hard”, etc. But we also have required evaluations (filled out anonymously by students when the instructor has left the room; we don’t get to see these until long after we’ve submitted the grades). I consistently get many positives on these, which I think reflects the thoughts of students who actually show up for class. And I take their comments seriously — including some very negative ones. Many of my colleagues have similar experiences. I suspect that many negative online postings are from bitter students who didn’t put in the effort (and weren’t at class the day of the evaluations, or many other days either). Not that I’m the greatest teacher, but I do put a lot of work into this in and outside the classroom and spend a lot of time with students who need help.
One of the biggest things that isn’t factored into the summary scores online is that there’s a direct correlation between favorability of ratings and course level. I get much better ratings overall in upper-level courses than in the introductory “weed-out” courses. This isn’t surprising, since in the intro courses there are many students who shouldn’t be there or haven’t yet matured academically, fresh out of highschool. So (as a tenured professor who looks at thousands of students’ ratings of untenured faculty members), one of the first things I consider is the level of the course. Invariably, Dr. X teaching an intro course will get worse ratings than Dr. Y teaching an upper-level course, and Dr. Z teaching graduate courses will probably get fantastic scores unless he or she really screws up.
I had an interesting conversation with a Business professor recently, who said (paraphrasing): “I teach Introductory Accounting, a required course. We look at lots of spreadsheets, do compound interest calculations, etc. A lot of the students come in expecting to be business tycoons and just hate it. But they need to know these things, and it’s tough. So, how do I compete with the young guy teaching a 4th year course in marketing who shows the students videos of the 10 best commercials of the last year, does simulated focus groups, has his class of 15 (as opposed to my class of 150) design ad campaigns, and so on?”
BTW, the above professor gets pretty good ratings but is considered by many to be boring and 2 hard.
Just a couple of things to think about when looking at online ratings and especially averaged scores.
PS: I just looked at RMP and saw that my worst review (of 4 total) was posted twice, once in full and once partially, both with the same scores. So, half of my total score is based on the same review counted twice. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the site.
Quite simply, RateMyProfessor posts a great deal of libellous comment. Student opinion is one thing, but too many comments pretend to make statements of fact – negative statements intended to harm the professors. Faculty unions should be going after ALL of the negative ratings on this site until stronger protocols are put in place. How do we get the unions to move on this?
I am a grad student and part-time adjunct. I teach two ethnic/cultural studies lower-level intro courses with 80+ students in each class. Based on those factors, I expect bad reviews on RMP. However, my official evaluations are very good and don’t correlate with the negative reviews in RMP. My problem with RMP is that it is an irresponsible website that does not monitor very offensive comments. For example, I had two postings that included some homophobic comments, one referring to me as a “dyke.” I’m trying to get those postings deleted.
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