Monday, December 24, 2012

CrayonEater Sends in a Story About the Site That Shall Not Be Named. From USA Today.

Rate My Professors not all it’s cracked up to be

In 1999, software engineer John Swapceinski launched the website teacherratings.com. The site, later renamed RateMyProfessors, allows college students in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to, well, give ratings of their professors.

RateMyProfessors allows anyone to give a rating for a professor. All you have to do is find the professor you want to review and then click on the “rate this professor” button and fill out the short survey.

The survey will ask you to rate the professor, using a scale of 1-5, on easiness, helpfulness, clarity, interest level prior to attending class and textbook use. Students can also choose to rate if their teacher is hot or not.

While many students find RateMyProfessor to be a useful site, others find it to be problematic. The biggest issue that critics have with the website is the validity of the ratings.

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5 comments:

  1. We all know the site is a fraud...

    You want more?

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  2. It would make for a great new year if a thousand kirpan-wielding Sikhs made kabobs out of the site that shall not be named and all those associated with it.

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  3. It's nice to see a student figuring it out (though I wouldn't have said that "professors rating themselves and their friends" was the WORST thing about the site.)

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  4. Whenever I read an article like this one by a student, I recall Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire:

    Blanche: But they're sweet things! And in the spring, it's touching to notice them making their first discovery of love! As if nobody hadever known it before!

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  5. I always cross referenced RMP with the student evaluations and the official grade letter distributions from the course. Worked out pretty well.

    ReplyDelete

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