Before enrolling -- Check prof RATINGS

JimDadinmia
Mon, 30 Nov 2020 14:12:40 +0000

That’s a valid point, of course – and it’s true of ALL ratings. Any time we look at any kind of rating, we have to do so with common-sense skepticism and the realization that some glowing ratings could be shills and some horrible ratings could be nonsense or worse.

Regardless of what kind of ratings I’m looking at, I don’t look at ONE rating in a vacuum. I consider the body of ratings, and especially the comments. A rating with no explanation is pretty useless. And comments like “Best prof EVER,” or “Worst prof EVER” are equally worthless.

The ratings I pay attention to are those which give explanations of the problems encountered – and even then I always ask myself, “Okay, this rater didn’t like XYZ…but would that bother ME?”

I also look at the number of ratings. If a prof has 117 ratings and a decent average, you can be pretty confident they’re good. If they have only 4 ratings, two of which have no comments and one of which is “worst ever,” obviously you can’t put much stock in that. You can’t just look at a number, you have to think and you have to do some qualitative assessment.

In the cases I cited, all of those profs had at least 30-40 ratings, and all of them had a number of negative comments which were about the same issues. If one kid can’t understand somebody’s accent, that is one situation. But when you have 50 ratings and 15-20 comments saying the prof doesn’t speak English…there’s a problem there.