By Madeline Weir
Staff Writer
“Oh, I checked their RateMyProfessors and it was horrible — don’t take a class with them,” is a sentence frequently heard on college campuses around the country. A website that lets students speak candidly about their experiences with professors seems like a useful tool, and a lot of students swear by the platform.
RateMyProfessors is a site consisting only of reviews written by students, about their professors. Reviews are required to have the course code, a one-to-five rating of the professor and their difficulty level, whether or not you would take the professor again, and a written review.
Other information can be added, including whether the class was taken for credit, if you needed a textbook, if attendance is mandatory, the grade you received and prewritten “tags” to choose from, such as “tough grader,” “extra credit,” “lecture heavy” and more. The date the review is posted is included in all published reviews.
While there are definite positives that come from RateMyProfessors, there are downsides that need to be addressed. Bias is present in many reviews, but the students writing such reviews would never admit to it. It is very possible that a student may not have wanted to put effort into a class and was mad when they had to study to get a good grade on a test. In that case, the review would not be an accurate review of the professor, but rather a reflection of the student’s work ethic.
Many students only post on RateMyProfessors when they’ve had a negative experience in a class. I often hear students saying they cannot wait until the end of the semester so they can take to the website and leave a review; however, I very rarely hear people say that they cannot wait to write a positive review. While I acknowledge some students review every professor they have, that is not often the case. Because of this, overall averages for a professor’s ratings may be negatively and wrongfully affected.
Students forget to consider that professors are people too. We are only able to see professors in a classroom setting, and most do not talk about their lives outside of academia. Students have complaints about slow email times, poor attitude, lack of empathy and more, but what they fail to realize is that professors could be facing hardships in their personal lives that they do not disclose to their students.
While professors are there to teach, their lives do not revolve around students. Professors do not exist to be at your beck and call, especially when you are an adult who is capable of problem-solving. Office hours exist physically and virtually, and most professors can accommodate if a student cannot go at those times. Most questions students have can also be answered by reading the syllabus.
By taking every RateMyProfessors review seriously, students may rob themselves of amazing professors. I almost did not enroll in a class because of the reviews a certain professor received, however, I am thankful I did not give them merit because I would have missed out on one of my most valuable connections here at the College.
I ask everyone to take these points into account the next time you are registering for classes because you never know what you could miss out on. If you take a professor with bad ratings and the ratings turn out to be accurate, you are learning how to deal with difficult higher-ups in the future. In the real world, you cannot change your boss if you do not like them, you simply have to learn how to manage your discomfort and keep producing work to the best of your ability.
