<p>Seems like its MIT’s internally managed “rate my professor”.</p>
<p>Well, the rating forms are distributed during the last week of classes, usually during the last class. So the response rate is high among people who attend the last class, but that’s not always a huge number of students, since the last class is often a review for the final, and some people don’t attend because there’s no new material introduced. </p>
<p>Also, since MIT allows students to drop a class until very late in the semester, the surveys don’t capture people who took the course up until Drop Date and then dropped – so people who complete the evaluations are more likely to be happy with the class than average.</p>
<p>I would trust the evaluations if they’re very positive or very negative, but if they’re slightly more positive or slightly more negative than average, I don’t know that I’d really take that seriously.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>With the difference being that random people don’t get to have input and the results aren’t displayed in a public forum.</p>
<p>I more or less agree with Mollie. Also, if you go for a department that runs its own Underground Guide (course 6 being the obvious example), those are often useful.</p>