How accurate is Rate My Professors?

juillet
Tue, 25 Nov 2014 16:11:17 +0000

Do not get me wrong, I do not think that you should take it as gospel, but if you have a professor with a 1.6 or a 2.1 rating and there are 20 reviews, all 20 folks cannot be crazy.



They certainly can! People who have had a very bad experience are more likely to be motivated to go onto Rate My Professor, and 20 students can be a very small fraction of a professor’s students.

Let’s take the example of a mid-career professor who has been teaching for 10 years. Let’s say he teaches 5 classes a year and each class averages 30 unique students. That means every year he teaches 150 students. Over 10 years, that’s 1500 students he’s taught. 20 students is 1% of that. You’re listening to the 1% of students who felt motivated enough to go onto RMP and rate him. Even if we took a professor who has only taught for 5 years (so relatively new, and not even tenured) who teaches 100 unique students a year, that’s still 500 students and 20 students is only 4% of that. Even 100 students would only be 20% of his total.

Besides, there is a lot of evidence to show that students’ ratings are correlated with their grades. If the student gets an F, they blame it on the professor (regardless of whether it was actually the professor’s fault, which in my experience it rarely is) and they give the professor a bad evaluation. IF the student gets an A, the professor gets a good evaluation. But the student who is satisfied with an A is much less likely to go on RMP than the student who gets a D and is outraged.

If you want to know the structure of a course ahead of time, you could always meet with a professor during office hours and ask to see the syllabus for the class or ask about the structure of the class. Sometimes professors change the structure if the old one was’t working, so the RMP reviews could be outdated.

I was also going to say exactly what @skieurope said. All professors speak English. Whether you can understand their accent is another question. But I assure you that thousands of students manage to do well in the classes of thousands of non-native speaking professors with accents. (And professors don’t get paid less because they speak English as a second language, so it’s not frugality. The tenure thing is closer, although that’s making the assumption that non-native English speakers are worse teachers because of their accents, which I think is wrong).

I have never had a professor tell me to “read the textbook.” Although I will say that if a professor does tell a student to “read the textbook,” perhaps it is because the student shows evidence of not having completed the reading?