We should drop RateMyProfessors • Tulane Hullabaloo

Created in 1999, Rate My Professors It was claimed “Provide a safe forum to share classroom experiences and help other students engage in critical education elections” — just like Boot was created to provide a wide bar for legal adults. Apparently, among the “critical educational preferences” in question was the attractiveness of the professor, as the website offered students a “chili pepper” rating that measured the professor’s attractiveness.

The phrase “Rate My Professors” has only become associated with anything related to education in recent years. In 2014, the Rate My Professors Instagram account changed its name to “Rate My Professors” as an April Fool’s joke.My History Teachers,” and the following year, the Twitter account asked its followers to retweet “…if you chose a professor’s class based on a C grade.”Chili Pepper.”

In the following years, several women professorsFurious that their careers have been reduced to a graphic of a flaming vegetable, they have demanded that the website’s temperature rating be removed rejected Although he intended a sexual connotation, it still fit. Having lost its “stinginess,” the website had to transform itself into something serious and educational, and fooled everyone.

For such an important institution — and it is today — Rate My Professors is a scam. Many college students will never take a professor with less than a four-star rating, and many who do have nightmares about it. College counselors, parents, and older siblings claim that taking a class without looking at a professor’s reviews is like crossing the street with your eyes closed.

This cult worships a false god. Rate My Professors requires no verification, so any user can rate any professor and do so multiple times with different devices and IP addresses. Reddit, Professors brag about leaving awful comments on their own pages to keep bad students out of their classes.

Sly girls TikTok published detailed tutorials on how to send your terrible professor’s rating plummeting into an inevitable abyss. And there must have been a few instances where a competitive professor gave one of his colleagues a one-star review, although I have no proof.

The website does have moderators who sometimes delete posts, but only for profanity and other content. unsuitable language; everything that focuses on the professor’s teaching remains. Efforts to ensure loyalty amount to little more than a feeble plea in the oxymoronic community guidelines section: “Be honest in your criticisms.”

Even if we ignore the technical flaws and assume that most of its users are actual students of the professors being reviewed, it would still be a bad resource; Rate My Professors is too emotional. To represent a professor’s overall rating, it requires a review from each of their students – the normal ones and the crazy ones.

But an optional website only attracts students who love or hate their professors so much that they go out of their way to leave a rating or review; students who find their professors unimportant, forgettable, or merely good have little incentive to do the same. Thus, a professor’s “overall rating” reflects a skewed selection of lovers and haters, not a general or random group of students.

The two types of “reviews” unique to Rate My Professors are at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The first type is the most notorious: satires that cram 14 insults—the professor is boring, has terrible handwriting, speaks strangely, coughs too loudly, etc.—into five angry sentences and then insist that one star out of five is too generous.

The second type will say something like, “When I was a freshman, I was struggling with depression and wanted to give up. But one day, Professor Smith saw me lying face down on the sidewalk on Bourbon Street and asked me if I was okay. He ended up being my favorite professor and now eats Thanksgiving dinner with my family. I served under his care for 16 years, and he is the godfather of my children. Five stars is not enough!”

If a teacher has a mediocre rating, there’s a good chance their comments aren’t a cohesive collection of mediocre comments, but rather a risqué mix of love letters and death wishes. There are mediocre comments, positive and negative, with solid reasoning for their praise or criticism, but many read as if they were pounded on the keyboard with curled fists or taken from a line in “Dead Poets Society.” It’s from these comments—the emotional outbursts of unverified users—that we shape our programs.