What's the first thing we as students suggest to each other when we're trying to pick classes? "Go on Rate My Professors and check out who's teaching!" On this site you can search your school, the departments and the faculty to see ratings from fellow students. There is a 1-5 scale for overall quality, helpfulness, clarity, easiness, and hotness (because that is a big factor for some people!). In addition to these ratings, you can read comments from people who have taken that professor's classes and see which particular class the comments are in reference to. This is especially helpful when you are trying to decide what section of a class to take, if more than one instructor is offering it.
What I find difficult about RMP is that it is very inconsistant. The professor you're wanting to research may not even be represented on the site (Andrew, you're not on there for Metro State!). Maybe a handful of dissatisfied students wrote reviews on a teacher, but the hundreds of happy ones didn't chose to write anything. It can be very one-sided. In addition, not every comment gets approved for posting. For example, I wrote a very unhappy review a couple years ago about an instructor at my community college. That review is nowhere to be found on RMP. My post didn't contain any vulgar language or grammatical errors, yet somehow in the approval process it got denied. Why was my comment any different than the 15 other unhappy reviews? According to the site's FAQ, comments are removed if they are "inconsistant with the site guidelines". I'm not going to read the fine print to find out what the guidelines are, but I'm fairly confident that I didn't violate them.
Whether every comment gets posted or not, there can be a plethora of positive and negative comments about any given professor. Based on the human obsession with complaining, there are often disproportionately more negative comments. When a professor stumbles across their review page, they can become outraged with the ratings they find. There is a trail of news stories about professors who strike back against the reviews and try to make a case for themselves. A post on Yahoo! Voices describes some of the arguments that professors have made against the comments they see posted about themselves. Even the RMP site has a section called "Professors Strike Back", in which professors can post video responses to the reviews they've gotten. To me this seems to detract from the site, taking away any professionalism that it might've had.
All of these inconsistencies have led me to believe that Rate My Professors can be a good start for gathering information, but should not be used exclusively to make decisions. If you choose to post on the site, I would recommend posting about the good and bad experience you've had to create a more balanced flow of information. I'm curious to know--have any of you used Rate My Professors? Do you think it is an accurate source of information, or is it just a place for students and professors to complain about each other?
I have only been on RMP once and found the same inconsistencies. I was looking up an instructor and found the responses all over the board. So I looked up an instructor I had already had a couple of times. Her feedback was consistent. Uh-Oh! So I had to re-read the feedback for the first search and by the time I was done I thought,"WTH! Just risk it!" Turned out to be one of my most interesting and fun classes. I agree that this should not be "The Place" to find out about an instructor but it would be nice to have some student feedback somewhere so you can see the good and bad experiences. I'm sure there are instructors out there that would like to see it too. I think RMP tends to be a Venting Outlet so the posts may not be taken as seriously. Its too bad because it could be a tool.
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