As registration season begins, many students are using Rate My Professor to see what peers have to say about SVSU professors.
While this is a good website in theory, it becomes much more complicated in practice and isn’t as reliable a source as many students think.
I first became interested in Rate My Professor back in January when I was registering for some new classes before the beginning of the semester. Because I was registering so late, I didn’t really have a choice about which professors I was going to take classes with, so I checked Rate My Professor.
When I saw that one of my professors had a rating below 2.0, I was horrified — until I looked at the comments.
The professor had been review-bombed. There were over forty comments, all made in one day, and some were just random words or keyboard smashes.
It was obvious that a student had been dissatisfied with their class experience, and when I found real comments, I found that there were some five-star and four-star reviews that gave me hope.
Now, that class has become one of my favorites, and the professor has been great. All of this to say, it begs the question: Is Rate My Professor a reliable source for students?
In some cases, it is. Review bombing seems rare on the site, according to my inspection, and when I checked back a few weeks after the class had started, the spammed reviews had been removed, which demonstrated some care within the website’s algorithm and monitoring.
Additionally, it has great tags that can be added to a review, like “Lecture Heavy” and “Hard Grader,” that can be useful for students when deciding whether or not they want to take a class with a certain professor based on their personal tastes and commitment level that semester.
There are some flaws with the platform, though; it doesn’t update often, it seems (or at least, it doesn’t take the time to remove professors that no longer work for the institution), and it severely limits the word count on students’ comments.
This is, however, balanced by the fact that students probably aren’t debating whether to take a class with a current professor or one that is no longer employed, and the tags help keep comments shorter.
The real issue comes with the human element of it all. While some professors may be proficient in teaching, the subjectivity of students can easily harm the overall rating.
Students seem to be more likely to rate a professor if they had a negative class experience with them.
I myself have been more inclined to go onto the website and rate a professor if they were a bad instructor; I won’t usually go out of my way to rate a professor if I liked them, because there is less to say.
This creates a bias that favors negative reviews, and while it isn’t bad to have a certain opinion on a class, it does overrun the positive aspects by a mile.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t some bad professors — we all run into them sooner or later. However, spamming a professor’s rating with keyboard smashes or offensive comments (I found anti-semitic comments under one professor’s page) takes away from both the credibility of the professors and the students.
How can we, as students, fix this? Outside of running the platform ourselves, there are a few things we can do.
Take the time out of your day to rate all of your professors, even if you have nothing particular to say—just giving an honest rating can help to improve the content on the website and provide actual feedback for students to go on.
Additionally, you can report ratings — but this tool shouldn’t be used subjectively. If you don’t like a professor and report positive ratings because they don’t match your experience, that can harm the reliability of the platform. When used responsibly, this tool can help rid the platform of obnoxious or offensive comments.
Overall, Rate My Professor is a good source for students to use when choosing which classes to take, but it shouldn’t be the only source. You can also ask other students and academic advisors about which courses and which professors will benefit you the most.
While this doesn’t completely take away the human bias, it at least gives a more reliable answer than faceless words behind a screen.
