RateMyProfessor

About

RateMyProfessor is a website for college students in the USA, Canada, and UK to offer reviews and opinions on their academic instructors.

History

RateMyProfessor was created by John Swapceinski in May of 1999 as TeacherRate.^[1] The name was changed to RateMyProfessor in 2001. On the site, students taking a course from a professor can rate the professor on a 1-5 scale of professor quality and level of difficulty. Until 2018, students could also rate professors on a "hotness" scale. Students can offer comments with a maximum of 350 characters. In 2005, the site was acquired by Patrick Nagle and William DeSantis, and in 2007, it was acquired by MTVU.

Reputation

The site was recognized by TIME as one of the 50 best magazines of 2008 and its data was included in Forbes' annual "America's Best Colleges" listing that year. However, it has also been subject to criticism. Studies showed that ease of course was correlated to positive ratings of the professor. Others have criticized the site for having gender bias in its ratings. Critic Edward Nuhfer wrote:

"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 PickAProf.com and RateMyProfessors.com. 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."

Hotness Rating Removal

On June 26th, 2018, professor and Twitter user @McLNeuro tweeted at RateMyProfessor about their "hotness" rating, calling it "obnoxious and utterly irrelevant to our teaching." The tweet gained over 2,900 retweets and 14,000 likes.

RateMyProfessors stated the chili pepper was meant to represent the dynamic/exciting teaching style of a professor, but acknowledged the conception and removed the pepper rating from their site. The brief controversy was covered by Daily Dot,^[2] Mary Sue,^[3] Cosmopolitan,^[4] and others.

Search Interest

External References