The first time I came across a website that rates teachers, I was in middle school. Back then, it was a way to laugh at bad reviews of my least favourite teachers and smile at the glowing reviews for my faves.
Now that I’m a (somewhat) mature college student, I wondered if I could turn to popular prof-rating website Rate my Professors for more useful, decision-making/teacher-picking information.
I wanted to know if I could really enhance my college experience by consulting a website before I chose my instructors, or at least have a legit reason to read through pages and pages of hilarious reviews. I figured, what better way to find out than to ask students, and teachers, what they think of the site.
Student feedback
With a name like Rate My Professors, it’s obvious the website is geared towards students. So hopefully students are using it.
For some Camosun students, like first-year Business Administration student Dan Ramage, Rate My Professors is an essential resource.
“I’ve picked seven different instructors from Rate My Professors,” says Ramage, “and I think it’s been an accurate representation.”
And for others, it’s more of a decision-making aid. Melanie Winter has used the website to scout out her instructors both at MacEwan University in Alberta and here at Camosun College during her first year of her Business Administration HR degree.
“If I go back and read the reviews of teachers I had, I find that they’re pretty accurate,” says Winter, “but when I look at reviews to find teachers I get a different outcome than what I thought.”
So Rate My Profs, as it’s called, may not be a one-stop shop for class picking, but what is it good for?
“It’s effective if you want to know if a person is a tough marker, or not easy to meet up with, or unhelpful, and that’s important,” says Winter. “Like if a person says, ‘That teacher grades completely hard and I’m usually an A+ student,’ I know it’s tough to do good in that class.”
But, of course, an online rating system like Rate My Professors has its negatives. “There are trolls who will write reviews just for the sake of doing negative reviews,” complains Ramage.
There is something about an anonymous online review service that can bring out the worst in people. Winter says that negativity can definitely be a downside on the website.
“I find people have the tendency to write more negative reviews than positive reviews,” says Winter. “That’s where it’s a downfall.”
But the apples aren’t all bruised on Rate My Professors, says Winter.
“It draws two types of people,” she says. “It draws the completely negative people who want to slam their teacher cause they’re mad, and it draws those who are top-notch students in the class who are into meeting with their teachers all the time and stuff like that, and want to write a good review.”
It may be hard to tell if someone who posts on Rate My Profs has a legitimate claim to shame or if they are just “somebody just didn’t do their work or has beef with the teacher for some reason,” says Winter.
But not everyone has trouble weeding out the legit from the less legit. “I can generally see through the trolls,” says Ramage. “It’s pretty easy if you ask me.”
Although Winter says she uses the site a lot to read comments and reviews on instructors, she usually refrains from posting herself unless it’s absolutely necessary.
“I just made my first review last semester,” says Winter. “It was a class I was nervous going in to and I wrote a review because I knew people out there like me, who are average students, would want to know what I wanted to know.”
The majority of the reviews on Rate My Prof stay on one end of the scale or the other. In the case of Ramage, he would only post “if I had a really bad experience, or if I had a really good experience.”
Winter says she is willing to go out of her way to recognize a good prof.
“If I went to a class and understood everything,” she says, “I would want to recognize the teacher for that.”
Teacher feature
There are two sides to every story, and what good is Rate My Professors without any professors?
Although you might think that your profs are stuck in the Stone Age, it’s likely they know about Rate My Profs as well.
“I knew it existed, but it had been a long time since I looked at it,” says Camosun Criminal Law professor Brian Young. “It was great, though. I got to look at a bunch of other profs; it’s hilarious.”
And if teachers are looking at it as well, it may have other uses than just helping you choose the least evil professor for next semester; it might help the teacher know what they need to change.
“When I read the reviews, I kind of go, ‘Well, that’s good,’ because that [feedback] is what I want,” says Young. “I think it’s great for me to be able to read it, and it’s completely anonymous.”
The anonymity of the site might make it an even more valuable resource for students.
“I used to use those hand out end-of-term review things and even that’s kind of difficult,” says Young, “because you are there in the class, they have this kind of subconscious awareness of it.”
As opposed to in-class reviews, Rate My Profs is not a one-time, one-place thing.
“The thing that’s kind of cool about Rate My Profs is that the students that want to do it can just go on there and do it,” explains Young. “They can tell the truth and give the feedback without any consequence, and sometimes that’s the best review.”
Young says that the site might even be able to draw more and better students.
“You’ve got to put a bit of effort into it,” he says, “so you’re doing it to help your fellow students.”
Young goes as far as to say that even the haters have useful things to say.
“If you’ve got nothing but negative reviews, there’s a message to you that you need to tinker with something, because something’s not working,” he says.
And what would Young say to the Negative Nellys? “You’d like to grab them and slap them around a bit and say, ‘Seriously?’ but what are you going to say? If some anonymous person says, ‘You suck,’ are you going to go, ‘No, I don’t’?”
More seriously, Young says he does appreciate the reviews. He says his real response to negative comments would be, “‘Thank you for the feedback.’ I think it’s great, I like what I do, and I think having the opportunity to get that feedback is great.”
It’s good to know that at least some teachers might be taking the comments on Rate My Professors to heart. It might even mean that Rate My Professors is useful for giving accurate and honest feedback for a professor to work with.
“When I read those reviews I think, ‘Maybe I am doing okay at this,’” says Young. “I’m doing what I would like to see a prof do, and I think it’s working for the students, so, in that way, I wish I had checked it sooner.”
The critics
Aside from knowing whether or not people are using and enjoying Rate My Professors, it’s important to examine whether there are any problems with the concept of the site itself.
For this, we turned to Camosun Sociology professor Peter Ove.
Ove admitted to checking out the site himself. “I think most profs have looked themselves up on it at some point,” he says. “Whether or not they think it’s useful, it’s kind of hard not to.”
From his experiences with the site, Ove has definitely encountered some problems. He agrees with student Melanie Winter that on Rate My Profs “you get two kinds of students; the ones who love the profs and the ones who hate them,” he says.
Ove says this makes for a less-than-desirable sample population. “You want a good sample, a proportional sample. You can’t have a random sample.”
Another thing that he says makes the website an ineffective survey tool is the lack of volume. “Good surveys have a large sample,” says Ove. “For example, right now I think I have two ratings, and I’ve had about 160 students a term for six terms now. So there’s nowhere near the number of students for it to actually be feasible.”
Ove does agree with Young that the end-of-term class surveys also aren’t the best way to get constructive criticism.
“You can have the same problem with in-class evaluations, though,” he says. “For an in-class evaluation you’re lucky to get 50 percent of students.”
One of the biggest problems with Rate My Profs is the criteria they use to rate instructors on the site, say Ove.
“The one real beef I have with rate my prof is the criteria they use: helpfulness, and clarity, and easiness,” he says. “That says a lot about what they think about teaching, and what they think the purpose of teaching is.”
For Ove, it’s an issue because it jumps to conclusions about what the whole point of college is. “It’s assuming that students are going to school simply to get it done, and not actually to expand your mind, learn something interesting, improve yourself, or help society,” he says.
Like any good critic, Ove has suggestions for improvement.
“The one category that’s really missing is something like importance or value, maybe the professor wasn’t very clear or helpful, but you learned a ton,” he says.
Ove does admit that there are times where the site might be helpful to students.
“Where a student looks and every single review is horrible, they might avoid that course,” he says. “But barring those extreme examples, when the class fits in your schedule is probably more important than minor differences in Rate My Professors.”
Final thoughts
One thing everyone, students and instructors alike, agrees on is that Rate My Professor is a place you can go to share and read other people’s opinions.
You might be with Ove, who says “it’s not going to accurately represent the teacher, but I don’t know if any evaluation is going to sum up everything about the teacher. What they do show is someone’s opinion, which is valuable, not because it’s all the truth. But because it’s someone’s opinion.”
Or you may side with Young, who says “there should be some tool where people can leave some opinion on whether this is a good course to take or not, and it’s not highly scientific, but sometimes we don’t need that; we just need what you think.”
Whether you like using Rate My Professors or not, as Ove says, “It’s one source of information which people can use, or not use, along with lots of other sources of information.”
So keep reading those ratings. Just remember to watch out for trolls.