Rate My Professors
RateMyProfessors.com is the most highly-trafficked website for rating professors across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. According to their website, users have posted more than 19 million ratings and rated 1.7 million professors. Over 7,500 schools used Rate My Professors with more than four million students visiting the platform every month.
At Utah State University, Rate My Professors appears to be wildly popular and successful. USU student Delaney Smith said, “I always look at Rate My Professors. I literally base my entire schedule around that.”
The rating website has proved to be crucial in taking classes from professors that are qualified, fair and care about their students. While USU does ask that students complete course evaluation forms at the end of each semester, these results are disclosed but not publicly advertised — encouraging use of websites (such as Rate My Professors) where students can publicly share their opinions.
Students can find the results of IDEA Surveys at usu.edu/aaa under the assessments tab.
Another student, Shelby Metten, said, “to be honest, I usually check to see what the workload is going to be. Like, if it’s going to be eight hours of reading every night on top of assignments, I just can’t do that.”
The Rate My Professors website offers several aspects of the course and professor to rate before determining said professor’s final score on a scale of one to five. The reviewer must leave their opinion about the quality and difficulty of the course (again, on a scale from one to five), whether or not the textbook is necessary and summarize their review with predetermined titles ranging from “awful” to “awesome.”
“I’m not afraid of a class that is difficult but enriching, said soon-to-be-graduate Drake Fresh. “Like, working hard doesn’t deter me, it’s more of the idea that I could work really hard and still get a poor grade because the professor’s expectations weren’t clear.”
Rate My Professors can be a bit misleading, since those who felt passionately about the course are the most likely to leave a review — negative or positive.
“You do kind of have to read between the lines though, to see if somebody [is just bitter they] got a bad grade,” Hunter said. But she also said that is usually pretty easy to tell based on the average professor review.
Kailey Foster said she used to rely on Rate My Professors pretty heavily, but now she’s a bit skeptical.
“The professor that I’m closest to in my department literally has a one-star average,” she said. “I was dreading her class freshman year, but I never would have guessed that she would be my favorite professor three years later.”
We all know that at the end of the day, reviews left on Rate My Professors, like any other popular (and free) opinion-based website (such as Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, Goodreads, etc.), should actually be taken 100% literally. There is absolutely no point or value in taking a class from a professor with less than a perfect five-star review. In fact, less-than-perfect professors deserve to be driven off the campus with pitchforks and torches. Get your “Where the Sagebrush Grows” mobbing merch at the campus bookstore today!
No, but guys, seriously. Even though the website relatively recently removed its “hotness scale” to determine which teachers are the most attractive, word of mouth is still getting people’s opinions around just fine.
Watch USU professors read their reviews on Rate My Professors.