Helpful or problematic?: Whether or not you should use Rate My Professors

To escape the horror of a dreadful semester and gain insight on potential future professors, many students use the same resource — Rate My Professors.

On the online platform, individuals are able to score professors based on the overall quality and level of difficulty of the class. 

With a point scale ranging from one to five, students express their opinions on course difficulty and professor engagement with the hope of letting other students know how good or bad a professor is before they enroll in the class. 

"I do take it into consideration if I see many comments that are not positive about a professor," Riley Gilmore, a sophomore majoring in political science and peace, war and defense, said. "I usually don't rely on one bad comment, but rather an overall trend."

For some, Rate My Professors is unreliable because anyone can leave a review without verifying if they ever took a course with the professor in question or even attended the university where the course was being offered. 

Others recognize that most of the comments are left by students who either did extremely well or extremely poorly in classes, like intro level courses, which fails to capture the average student's experience in the course. 

“Unless there is a consistent trend, I take comments students say with a grain of salt because a comment could just be an angry student that is upset they got a C,” Banks Grubbs, a junior majoring in environmental health sciences, said.

Rebecca Kreitzer, an assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy, has conducted research regarding bias in student evaluations of teaching.  

Kreitzer said she understands that students use websites like Rate My Professors because standard teacher evaluations are not public information to students. She does, however, recognize many of its shortcomings. 

Launched in 1999, Rate My Professors has faced backlash toward certain site features, like previously having the chili pepper icon indicate whether a professor was attractive. Kreitzer said metrics like these encouraged students to review the professors personally rather than the course material itself.

“Rate My Professors comments in particular tend to show strong gendered effects whereby women and men professors are described as categorically different words,” Kreitzer said. 

Through her research, Kreitzer found that women and people of color tend to have lower class assessments. She said women tend to receive more comments about their appearance, whether they were nurturing and other phrases that expand upon gender stereotypes. 

Men receive more comments about how brilliant, funny or engaging they are. Even when women are being complimented, it also comes with gender stereotypes attached to them, she said. 

“I see that males tend to be called funnier," Jess Everett, a sophomore majoring in psychology, said. "I think there is a language difference when describing male and female professors, but I try to create my own judgments."

Kreitzer said that in departments like women’s studies, female professors will receive better reviews than men, unlike departments with gender stereotypes, like math and computer science. 

Kreitzer also said she has found that the platform tends to show differences in quantitative and qualitative assessments of teachers not only based on gender, but also based on race. 

“I think Rate My Professors is both gendered and sexist and racist,” Kreitzer said.

Kreitzer said she recommends students talk to other students who may have taken the course, or even reach out to the professors directly to try and get a feel for their teaching style. She thinks even asking people in UNC Facebook groups is more reliable because someone's name will be attached to their comments. 

"Rate My Professors.com is just not high-quality information," Kreitzer said. "I encourage students to look for sources of information including other students, syllabi from previous semesters, etc., to kind of grow their own impression about potential classes and faculty." 

@nathankwesley

university@dailytarheel.com