Here’s the problem with Rate My Professors

In late October, Cheddar, a relatively new media company, acquired Rate My Professors, a website that allows students to rate their instructors anonymously.

The web service’s acquisition marks the perfect opportunity for alterations. The site, while helpful, is biased and should not be trusted in its current state.

Although the site can be an undeniably helpful tool for some quick research on professors and classes, it requires numerous systematic changes to better assist the students who use it. As the tool becomes highly used, the system should be amended to be more objective and less biased by emphasizing the distinction between professors as individuals and as instructors.

College students from over 7,500 universities in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom are well-acquainted with Rate My Professors. As USC students register for Spring 2019 courses, many are turning to the website for various rating metrics — quality, difficulty, attendance policy and others — to aid in their course choices.

A crucial aspect of the website is that reviewers are able to maintain anonymity, which theoretically allows students to be honest without fear of repercussion; however, anonymity has several drawbacks, including the fact that individuals have no accountability for what they say online. As such, students who may not have had a particular professor or taken a certain course still have the ability to leave reviews, and students can even leave multiple reviews for an instructor. Though this is not possible if it stems from the same IP address, users with multiple electronic devices and IP addresses can easily skew the rating.

There are also considerable disparities in the reviews that are left for the same professors. On the page of a professor at the School of Cinematic Arts, one student warns, “Get ready to die. You will be stressed if you take the course,” while another praises the class as “Very inspirational. Learned more in this class than any other class I took last semester.” The voluntary response bias, which overrepresents strongly opinionated individuals, also explains why there is such a large disparity; the individuals most likely to leave responses clearly have strong opinions about the instructor and their course, though those opinions may not be uniform.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the website is that it reduces individual instructors into mere numbers, removing the human aspects of teaching that are difficult to quantify.

The inseparability of professors as people and as professionals is exemplified by the “hotness” rating, a category that existed on Rate My Professors until July 2018. A 2017 study by  “Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education” found that professors who were deemed as attractive frequently had a higher overall teaching rating. However, the hotness category was eventually removed due to its objectification of instructors.

Despite these shortcomings, the  concept of Rate My Professors has potential for growth. With the change in ownership, it is the ideal time to make the needed changes on the website. Some of these problems have simple solutions, such as requiring that students make an account with an university email before leaving a review to prevent multiple reviews for the same instructor or the creation of a system that checks that a student actually had a particular professor before they can leave reviews.

Other changes will require heavy discussion, such as bridging the clear differences in opinions, reflected in the wide range of reviews, by redefining what each numerical score means. And perhaps most difficult, some improvements are more systematic and require drastic measures, such as the issue of separating professors as people from their jobs within the classroom.

Regardless of changes that are made, Rate My Professors will continue to be utilized. However, it does not mean there isn’t substantial room for improvement. There are fundamental changes that will better assist both parties involved: the professors and their potential students. When utilized properly, the professor rating tool can give the educators more insight to refine their teaching and help students find the perfect instructor for a course.