Nov
17
Ratemyprofessors.com receives mixed reviews
BY CHARLY HALEY
Copy Editor
Whether it’s to criticize, to seek guidance or simply out of curiosity, students and teachers are visiting ratemyprofessors.com.
Ratemyprofessors.com is a website that allows college students to publicly evaluate their professors by posting ratings and comments online. Over 6,000 colleges and universities are represented on the website, including MSUM.
There are a variety of reasons why students use ratemyprofessors.com.
“It’s really helpful,” junior Kirby Price said. “It is basically a decision-maker for me.”
Price said he checks the website almost every semester before he signs up for classes, particularly to look at the evaluations of professors for classes he has to take that are not within his major, because he is unfamiliar with them.
“I’ve visited it,” sophomore Britt Lazur said, “because I’ve wanted to see, with the professors that I was already signed up for, what I was getting myself into.” Lazur visits the website about once a semester, but unlike Price, she visits the website after she registers for classes to get an idea of what she should prepare for in the upcoming semester.
Lazur also said that she has visited the website when she was having a negative experience with a professor, to see what other students thought. She said it was reassuring to see that other students were displeased with the professor’s teaching style, and that she was not the only one who felt that way.
Price and Lazur have each posted on the website once.
“I would only post on there if it was an extreme case,” Lazur said.
Both Price and Lazur said that the most helpful evaluations are those that are specific in describing the pros and cons of a professor. Evaluations that simply say whether or not the reviewer liked the teacher without any reasoning or description of the professor’s teaching style are considered less helpful.
While many students do use ratemyprofessors.com, there are also reasons why several students choose not to.
“If I need to know anything about a professor, I usually ask people if they’ve had them,” senior Bethany Tickle said, “or if I have to take the class anyway, I just figure it’s best not knowing if they’re good or bad because it’s the only professor available.”
Because the website is public, the evaluations on ratemyprofessors.com are not only available to students, but are also viewed by professors.
“Maybe once every six months or so, I take a look, mostly out of curiosity,” said philosophy professor Randy Cagle, Ph. D.
“Occasionally there are comments that I find helpful,” Cagle said. “If I found a consistent complaint or recommendation that popped up a lot about how I could do something better, then sure, I would consider doing things differently in accordance with those recommendations.”
Computer science professor Daniel Brekke, Ph. D. said he had visited the website “strictly out of curiosity.”
Unlike Cagle, Brekke does not use the website as an evaluation tool. He said the website isn’t an accurate representation of the students’ opinion because the comments he sees posted are “few and far between,” and those that are posted are usually by students that have an extreme opinion, which does not accurately represent all students.
Cagle also addressed that the comments on the website can be extreme.
“I think that students who bother to log on to the site and write a paragraph or two about my teaching are students who probably feel strongly one way or the other,” Cagle said.
“I’ve noticed that the comments tend to be either very positive or very negative; the center tends to vanish a little bit.”
Similarly to Price and Lazur, Cagle said that specific reviews are the most helpful.
“Praise is nice and praise is flattering, but sometimes specific comments about specific things that I do or fail to do are most helpful, and that’s what I look for here,” Cagle said.
English professor Laura Fasick, Ph. D. never looks at ratemyprofessors.com, because she believes it is a website “for students, by students.”
“It’s not something that I would feel comfortable doing (visiting the website), because it seems as though it’s something that the students aren’t expecting me to participate in or to look at,” Fasick said. “I tend to think of it as a conversation that I’m not meant to be a part of.”
Fasick, Cagle and Brekke compared ratemyprofessors.com to the student evaluations distributed at the end of every semester.
“I think the more important thing is the student evaluations,” Brekke said, “because the entire class would fill that out.”
“Sometimes students will write more on ratemyprofessors than they will on their in-class evaluations of their instructors,” Cagle said. “I’ve noticed that perhaps they feel as if they have more time, or perhaps they feel as if it’s more anonymous. So I find it helpful in ways that I don’t always find the standard evaluation process to be.”
“As far as professors are concerned, I would feel as though a website like ratemyprofessors is almost unnecessary,” Fasick said, because the student evaluations are meant to provide feedback to teachers.
Lazur disagrees with Fasick’s opinion, saying that she thinks it would be helpful for professors to use ratemyprofessors.com as one of many self-evaluation tools.
According to Price, Tickle and Cagle, the popularity of ratemyprofessors.com seems to be declining among students at MSUM.
“It needs to be known, especially to incoming freshmen,” Price said. “It’s not as popular, just because people don’t talk about it like they did when I first came to college.”
Although there are several different opinions regarding ratemyprofessors.com, students and professors can check out the website for themselves, and for even more information can visit the website’s recently added Facebook page.
Haley can be reached at haleych@mnstate.edu
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