Nearly three decades after its launch, Rate My Professors remains a go-to tool for college students—even as questions about the accuracy of its reviews continue to follow the site.
Rate My Professors is a free web-based platform that allows college students to anonymously review and rate professors and campuses at institutions in the U.S., Canada, and the UK. It is currently the largest online destination for professor ratings, featuring over 19 million reviews for roughly 1.7 million professors across over 8,000 educational institutions. On the platform, students can rate their professors from one to five stars and leave a comment on their overall teaching.
While some students find the website helpful when deciding on their classes for the semester, others claim that Rate My Professors helps find professors who are more “graceful”.
Adedigba Gbadeoluwa Moses, a student majoring in polymer sciences and engineering, says that even despite the risk of inaccurate information, the site can still be useful.
“I think it is very helpful despite it not always being accurate,” said Moses. “It was very helpful for the courses that had multiple professors, like calculus and differential equations.”
Other students, however, question how accurate the site really is. Since the students who are most likely to rate a class online are either those who really loved the class or those who really hated the class.
Dr. Vickie Reed, an assistant professor in the public health department who has a rating of 4.9 on Rate My Professors, stated that students might be rating for the course difficulty rather than the professor’s ability.
“I teach foundation courses, and my classes are easy if you do the assignments,” Reed said. “For harder classes, students might be rating how much they enjoyed the course rather than how well the professor did.”
Reed added that most professors do not care about their Rate My Professors ratings, regardless of whether it is positive feedback or negative feedback.
“I look at my internal Southern Miss review and have not even checked my Rate My Professors for years,” Reed added. “It is more accurate to look at the internal review because I can get more personal feedback from individual course sections.”
A lot of reviews on Rate My Professors also tend to focus on things that do not directly relate to the professor’s teaching skills. For example, a lot of reviews for courses like organic chemistry, that are considered “weed-out” courses, feature students’ complaints about having to take the course rather than the professor’s teaching. Most universities do not rely on Rate My Professors but on their internal survey when considering academic reviews.
