The website, RateMyProfessor has become a mainstay for students everywhere as it gives students some insight on the classes and professors that they are about to spend a pretty penny on and hopefully steer the student towards a smoother semester than they would have otherwise. It would probably be more difficult to find a student that has not used the platform then the latter. With that being said, however, maybe we ought to take a second and question whether or not this website really is the beacon of knowledge that people flock to it as or if we need to approach this with more wary footing.
At its core, RateMyProfessor is a service to the students, but one thing I wanted to set out to do was try and get a perspective from those getting reviewed rather than just those who set out to do or read the reviews. My pursuit of doing so landed me in a conversation with Steve Gabbitas, a communications professor at Cal State Bakersfield,who tackled the main issues with not only Rate My Professor, but any user rated system as a whole.
“Any rating system is totally filtered by who wants to go back and give a rating… because they’re either super disgruntled or they got an A plus and thought “Woohoo! Easy A!” Everyone who lands in the middle and gets anything from an A minus to a C plus just takes their grade and goes on,” Gabbitas said.
That is one of the biggest problems with RateMyProfessor, it goes completely against how statistics fundamentally works. In anything, there will be outliers on the graph or extremes that make up the ends of the bell curve. Normally, there will be more neutral responses to average the extremes out, but when you only sample from the extremes, there is not a possible chance that a clear picture can be drawn.
Another major problem that arises from this is the rating system that the website chooses to use. All professors are to be rated on a scale of 1-5 for their overall performance which leads to what is probably the biggest flaw of the website, and that is the inability to mash a complex person into an easy to digest score. A professor who gets a five out of five because they are the best at getting their students to learn through work that inspires growth has just as much weight as a professor who gets five out of five due to giving out easy work that takes no effort.
To better elaborate on this point, I spoke with Aaron Hegde, a professor of economics and executive director of the Grimm Family Center for Agricultural Business at CSUB to view the disconnect between human attributes and data collection.
“It’s basically do I like the professor or do I not right? It’s a qualitative thing … We’re not all identical. So, to rely on another person’s opinion on something as important as taking a class? Statistically it does not make sense because it’s not a quantitative measure, but you’re giving it a quantitative score,” Hegde said.
Now, just because I think the rating system is flawed with RateMyProfessor it does not mean that I do not think that we should all disband from it and gamble with our next semester’s schedule. More so, I feel like it is up to us to take the abstract data that was collected and do some legwork of our own to extrapolate beneficial data that gives us a better picture of what is to come with these professors and their classes.
Esteban Juarez, a criminal justice senior at CSUB, spoke on his strategies that give him the edge when it comes to finding what he wants on the website.
“I go based off how they describe the professor… [D]oes the professor sound like someone who is willing to work with you and is willing to teach the material rather than be dismissive and ignoring the students. That’s what I go off of,” Juarez states.
At the end of the day, RateMyProfessor is the best avenue to gain insight into what classes are really like, but that is due to the fact that it is our only outlet that isn’t just word of mouth from students prior. The course surveys that are often made mandatory and hold a wider net of student responses are only applied internally to where we are left to rely on our peers for guidance. It is then up to us to do our due diligence and take the steps necessary to see what it is we want out of a professor and choose the ones that best fit our needs.