When choosing a class, many students must ask themselves, does the instructor have a chili pepper?
Well, maybe this isn’t a case for most, but it’s one of the things students can find out when they research their instructors’ ratings on www.ratemyprofessor.com.
Along with finding out whether an instructor is hot or not, students can find out how helpful they are along with how easy their classes may be.
However, many times ratings can be misleading, whether by a student expressing bias toward a favorite professor or even by the professors themselves who log online to attract more students to their classes.
“I hope students don’t confuse being an easygoing professor with having an easy class, because it isn’t the same thing,” Tom Fonte, Spanish professor, said.
“Students need to be able to interpret the comments that are left on the website,” he said.
With ratemyprofessor.com being such an easy tool to use, it’s easy to see why students would use it.
“I wish we had something like this when I was in college, but I got along just fine without it,” Stacey Allen, sociology professor, said.
Many instructors would agree that students’ opinions over whether or not to take a class should not be based wholly on the comments left on rate my professor.
“If they make that their only source, if they just use hearsay, then that’s bad, because the Web site doesn’t tell you about the instructor but what some students thought about that instructor,” Fonte said.
“It’s not a matter of the instructor being good or bad; it’s based on you and your match with the instructor,” he said.
Still, that has not stopped students from using rate my professor to help pick out their potential classes.
“I’ll get together the classes I want to take and then go to ratemyprofessor.com to see which instructor gets a good rating and I’ll try harder to get those classes (with instructors that have good reviews),” Sheri Baxter, undecided major, said.
Many though, don’t use ratemyprofessor.com as their only source for choosing classes.
“I take word of mouth when it comes to picking an instructor but if no one I know has taken the instructor, then I go to ratemyprofessor.com,” Cortney Neal, criminal justice major, said.
Neal has also learned to take the comments on ratemyprofessor.com with a grain of salt.
“I took a class and (the comments on ratemyprofessor.com) said it was an easy class but only because the instructor didn’t give any homework,” she said.
“Yeah, it was an easy class but I didn’t get any educational value out of it,” Neal said.
