CHELSEA POWRIE

The popular website RateMyProfessors.com is too crowded with conflicting personal opinions to be the easy, reliable tool for course planning that it sets out to be — often it does more harm than good.

RateMyProfessors.com is a website that allows students to search for their post-secondary institution and then browse its professors by department. Professors have their own pages where students can see average ratings that other users provided on a given teacher’s “clarity,” “easiness” and “helpfulness,” all which have a maximum rating of five. Students can also browse the individual reviews, which come with comments, or leave their own.

The comments for any given professor tend to range dramatically from an enthusiastic thumbs up to a vindictive rant, with a telling correlation to how well the student did in the class. Since it is difficult to tell whether these anonymous commenters are blaming their lazy study habits on the professor or if the final really was impossible, the overall rating provided for a given professor can be misleading. To get an idea of a professor in general, students should be prepared to dig through the entire comment section and weed out the truth by comparison.

The basic idea behind the site is a good one. Ideally, it could be a tool to help students avoid those terrible professor experiences we’ve all been cursed with at one point or another — the unintelligible lecture style, the unanswered emails requesting extra help or the indecipherable final exam questions. But in practice, a lot of noise gets in the way.

For example, take the instance of the following professor in the geology department at the University of Saskatchewan. This professor teaches first year classes, open to students in any faculty and good options for science electives. They are an ideal candidate for the type of course planning that this site aims to help with.

Among the first comments on the page, the ones most likely to be read back to back are about the professor’s Geology 121 class. Commenters rated the professor’s helpfulness, clarity and easiness as 2, 1, 1, followed by 5, 5, 4. They expanded by commenting, “Hated every lecture I went to, couldn’t understand [the professor] and what [they] wanted us to know,” and respectively, the professor “changed the way I look at the world, for that I will always be thankful.” Similar examples can be found throughout the site with professors of all departments.

So what is a student reading these to think? It seems to me that in some cases, student reviewers confuse their lack of suitability for or interest in a course’s subject matter and subsequent poor performance with an incapable professor. Some commenters do strive to leave detailed and thoughtful feedback, even addressing previous negative comments and attempting to explain why they think a person could have had a bad experience in the class. Other comments are as blunt and inarticulate as, “They’re the worst!!” — which isn’t helpful to anyone.

After reading the entire comment sections of several professor pages — both for professors I had experienced myself and for professors I hadn’t — I came to the conclusion that with careful effort, a decent portrait could be wrung from the chaos.

However, it took time and concentration, given that some professors have up to hundreds of comments and ratings. I found the average rating presented at the top of the page was usually misleading and that the five-point rating scale in general was far less helpful than weeding through the comments.

My conclusion only applies to professors with first-year classes however. These professors have far more reviews than upper-level professors and a larger opinion pool is more likely to dilute the revenge reviews. For upper-year classes, RateMyProfessors.com does not come close to being as useful as speaking to students further along in a program. As a better option, word of mouth comes with the advantage that the reviewer is not anonymous and their review can be qualified with personal knowledge of their character and study habits.

RateMyProfessors.com tries to be a fast, easy tool, but in reality it requires effort to provide results. If you use the site, do yourself a favor and set aside some time to go through it with care. Don’t rely on the average ratings or the first few comments — you might just miss out on a professor that would have been a perfect fit.