RateMyProfessors.com

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:Ratemyprofessorsscreenshot.JPG RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is a website, founded in May 1999 by John Swapceinski, a software engineer from Menlo Park, California, which allows college/university students to "grade" the professors of American, Canadian, British and Australian institutions. The site contains more than four million ratings, regarding more than 500,000 professors. The site was originally launched as TeacherRatings.com and converted to RateMyProfessors in 2001.

Assistance is provided by volunteer college students all over the United States and Canada who help moderate the ratings and modify professor listings in order to ensure accuracy. All ratings are anonymous without any instructor input or decisions. According to the site's privacy policy, RateMyProfessors.com will only reveal a user's personal information in response to a court order or a subpoena. [1]

RateMyProfessors has several sister sites located at Ratingz.net as well as the high school site RateMyTeachers.com.

In 2005, RateMyProfessors was sold to Baltimore Solutions Inc, operator of Swooks.com.

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Criticism

Critics of RateMyProfessors.com have two primary complaints with the system of rating instruction that the site employs. The first is that it actually does a disservice to students by the nature of its passive method of data collection. Studies of research methodology have shown that in formats where people are able to post opinions publicly, group polarization often occurs, and the result is that a given instructor will often receive very positive comments, very negative comments, and little in between, meaning that those who would have been in the middle are either silent or pulled to one extreme or the other. [2] By presenting such comments as the consensus of a student body about an instructor, the evaluation can be confusing, not to mention misleading.

Another complaint concerning the method of instructor evaluation used by RateMyProfessors.com and other sites like it is that unlike other methods of rating teacher performance, most teachers themselves do not feel they gain any helpful feedback. Rather, they say that it only leads to the harrassment of particular instructors. The founder's stated purpose was for the site to be a resource for students only, so some argue that the validity of this particular criticism is dubious. Further, instructors have voiced concern that it and similar methods are in fact counterproductive to the educational process by minimizing the importance of quality in instruction and instead encouraging students to see themselves as consumers filling out product satisfaction surveys, a disheartening perception of student values. This sentiment has been articulated by Professor Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia, in what has been described as an influential essay, "As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students", on the topic of course evaluations.

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Proponents

Proponents of RateMyProfessors.com consider it to be an excellent and accurate resource for deciding what professors they should take the following semester.

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