RateMyProfessors.com
Type of site | review site |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | New York City |
| Owner | mtvU |
| Created by | RateMyProfessors.com |
| URL | http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ |
RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is a review site, founded in May 1999 by John Swapceinski, a software engineer from Menlo Park, California, which allows college and university students to assign ratings to professors and campuses of American, Canadian, and United Kingdom institutions. The site was originally launched as TeacherRatings.com and converted to RateMyProfessors in 2001. RateMyProfessors.com was acquired in 2005 by Patrick Nagle and William DeSantis.[1] Nagle and DeSantis later resold RateMyProfessors.com in 2007 to Viacom's mtvU, MTV’s College channel.[2]
RateMyProfessors.com is the largest online destination for professor ratings. The site has 7,500+ schools and over 13,000,000 entirely student-generated [citation needed] comments and ratings, RateMyProfessors.com is the highest trafficked free site for researching and rating 1,500,000+ professors from colleges and universities across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. RateMyProfessors also has an iPhone app.
Ratings and reviews on RateMyProfessors
Users who have or are currently taking a particular professor’s course, may post a rating and review of any professor already listed on the site. Furthermore, users may create a listing for any individual not already listed. To be posted, a rater must rate the course and/or professor on a 1-5 scale in the following categories: "easiness", "helpfulness", "clarity", the rater's "interest" in the class prior to taking it, and the degree of "textbook use" in the course. The rater may also rate the professor on their hotness, and may include comments of up to max 350 characters in length.
According to the website’s FAQ page, "The Overall Quality rating [that the professor ends up with] is the average of a teacher's Helpfulness and Clarity ratings...." It’s the professor’s Overall Quality rating that determines whether his/her name, on the list of professors, is accompanied by a little smiley face (meaning "Good Quality"), a frowny face ("Poor Quality"), or an in-between, expressionless face ("Average Quality"). A professor's name is accompanied by a chili pepper icon if the sum of his or her "HOT" ratings is greater than zero (one "hot" rating equals +1, one "not hot" equals −1).
RateMyProfessors Top Lists
Each year, RateMyProfessors.com compiles Top Lists of the Highest Rated Professors, Hottest Professors, and Top Schools in the U.S. based on ratings and comments from students. Many of these reviews are hand-puppet reviews. Many Professors just use different IPs as students and give themselves excellent reviews if they want more students or poor reviews if their classes are oversubscribed. The student IP's can be identified. Many students have their grades changed depending on their reviews. It is not a safe site. Like facebook it is very leaky.
Professor Rebuttals
Since mtvU took over the website, RateMyProfessors.com has added a rebuttal feature which allows professors to rebut students' comments. Professors must register with the website, using an ".edu" e-mail address, in order to make their rebuttals. The site also has a feature called "Professors Strike Back" which features videos of professors responding to specific ratings that they received on RateMyProfessors.[3] John Swapceinski set up RateMyProfessors.com and also RateMyMD.com. Because of hand-puppet reviews, also called astroturfing, this later site has caused the death of several patients."A plastic surgeon has positive online reviews. But not from that patient who died. By Ashley Harrell"
School Ratings
Students can also comment on and rate their school as well, by visiting their school's RateMyProfessors.com school page. School Ratings categories include Academic Reputation, Location, Campus, School Library, Food, Clubs & Activities, Social Events, and Happiness.
Other Features
Ratemyprofessors.com regularly updates the site to meet student preferences. In 2009, RateMyProfessors introduced an iPhone app. And in late 2011, professors were given the ability to make their Twitter handle available on their professor profile pages for students to follow.
Recognition
In 2008 ratemyprofessors.com was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2008.
Whether you're deciding between French teachers or you just want to vent about last semester's lousy history lecturer, Rate My Professors is the place to go. Students can anonymously grade profs on everything from how difficult they are to the clarity of their lectures — and now teachers can add rebuttals of their own.[4]
Student evaluations of Professors from Ratemyprofessors.com actually accounts for 25% of a schools rating in Forbes annual “America’s Best Colleges Listing.”
Students are consumers, who, ostensibly at least, attend college to learn and acquire knowledge and skills. The core dimension of the learning experience comes from attending classes taught by instructors. Asking students what they think about their courses is akin to what some agencies like Consumers Report or J.D. Powers and Associates do when they provide information on various goods or services.[5]
Validity
Scholarly Assessments of Ratemyprofessors.com
RateMyProfessors.com versus formal in-class student evaluations
Using data for 426 instructors at the University of Maine, [researchers] examined the relationship between RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) indices and formal in-class student evaluations of teaching (SET). The two primary RMP indices correlate substantively and significantly with their respective SET items: RMP overall quality correlates r = .68 with SET item, Overall, how would you rate the instructor?; and RMP ease correlates r = .44 with SET item, How did the work load for this course compare to that of others of equal credit? Further, RMP overall quality and RMP ease each correlates with its corresponding SET factor derived from a principal components analysis of all 29 SET items: r = .57 and .51, respectively. [6]
Criticism
Evaluation bias
The main criticism of RMP is that there is little reason to think that the ratings accurately reflect the quality of the professors rated.[7][8] Also, "easiness", "clarity" and "helpfulness" are the only components taken into consideration.[9][10] Edward Nuhfer says that both Pickaprof.com and RMP "are transparently obvious in their advocacy that describes a 'good teacher' as an easy grader. ... Presenter Phil Abrami...rated the latter as 'The worst evaluation I've seen' during a panel discussion on student evaluations at the 2005 annual AERA meeting."[11] A study of RMP ratings conducted by James Felton found that "the hotter and easier professors are, the more likely they’ll get rated as a good teacher."[12] Edward Nuhfer has argued, "Pseudo-evaluation damages the credibility of legitimate evaluation and victimizes individuals by irresponsibly publishing comments about them derived from anonymous sources. This is voyeurism passed off as 'evaluation' and examples lie at http://www.pickaprof.com/ and http://ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp. Neither site provides evaluation of faculty through criteria that might be valuable to a student seeking a professor who is conducive to their learning, thinking or intellectual growth."[13]
Multiple ratings per person
Single individuals are able to make multiple separate ratings of a single professor on RMP.[14] RMP admits [15] that while it does not allow such multiple ratings from any one IP address, it has no control over raters who use several different computers, or those that "spoof" IP addresses. Also, there is no way of knowing that those who rate a professor's course have actually taken the course in question, making it possible for professors to rate themselves and each other,[16] As recently as May 2006, the FAQ page on RMP itself said:
Who can rate? Is it limited to students? We prefer that you only rate teachers you have first-hand knowledge of. However, it is not possible for us to verify which raters had which teachers, so always take the ratings with a grain of salt. Remember, we have no way of knowing who is doing the rating — students, the teacher, other teachers, parents, dogs, cats, etc.[17]
Rating relevancy
Critics state that a number of the ratings focus on qualities they see as irrelevant to teaching, such as physical appearance.[18]
It is common at universities and colleges for faculty (especially junior faculty) to be called on by their departments to teach courses on topics that are not within their area(s) of expertise, which can earn them poor ratings at RMP that do not reflect the ability of those professors to teach courses on subjects that they are much more qualified to teach.[citation needed] RMP, though it lets the student identify the course that they took with the professor, lumps together the ratings for all courses taught by each professor, instead of providing separate ratings averages for each course taught.
Permanent vs part-time faculty
Part time (also known as adjunct) faculty are not always readily identifiable nor verifiable, as part-time professors often work at multiple schools or maintain employment outside the school.
See Also
- Rate My Course - Student-generated ratings for college professors.
- Rate My Teachers – Student-generated ratings for high school teachers.
- Rate Your Students – Instructor generated student-reviews.
Notes
- ^ Wired Magazine - 2005
- ^ "MTV Networks' mtvU Agrees to Acquire RateMyProfessors.com".
- ^ Professors Strike Back on mtvU - As Seen on Rate My Professors
- ^ "50 Best Websites 2008". Time. 17 June 2008.
- ^ "Methodology". Forbes. 13 August 2008. Retrieved 18 November 2011.
- ^ "RateMyProfessors.com versus formal in-class student evaluations of teaching".
- ^ Sacha Pfeiffer, "Ratings sites flourish behind a veil of anonymity", September 20, 2006, Boston Globe Online [1]
- ^ Kenneth Westhues, "Stephen Berman: Scapegoat", Dec 2006
- ^ James M. Lang, "RateMyBuns.com", Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2003 [2]
- ^ See Fritz Machlup and T. Wilson, cited in Paul Trout, "Deconstructing an Evaluation Form", The Montana Professor, Vol. 8 No. 3, Fall 1998, accessed 7 May 2008.
- ^ Edward B. Nuhfer, 2005, "A Fractal Thinker Looks at Student Evaluations", accessed 10 May 2008.
- ^ David Epstein, "‘Hotness’ and Quality", Inside Higher Ed, 8 May 2006, accessed 10 May 2008.
- ^ Edward Nuhfer, 2010, "A Fractal Thinker Looks at Student Evaluations", accessed April 25, 2010.
- ^ Gabriela Montell, "The Art of the Bogus Rating", Chronicle of Higher Education, September 27, 2006 [3]
- ^ Pfeiffer, "Ratings sites flourish behind a veil of anonymity".
- ^ Montell, "The Art of the Bogus Rating", Chronicle of Higher Education.
- ^ www.ratemyprofessors.com/faq.jsp, 18 May 2006, accessible via http://www.archive.org/web/web.php; also quoted in Westhues "Stephen Berman: Scapegoat"
- ^ Lang, "RateMyBuns.com".