MEAN, GROUCHY, EVIL IN EVERY WAY'
FlashFAST isn’t the only Web site loading on students’ computers around registration time. RateMyProfessor.com often lurks in the background

Story by Tim Magaw // Illustration by Leslie Arntz

When Kim Ugran received her class schedule right before the start of her freshman year, she took her older sister’s advice and logged onto RateMyProfessors.com and looked up the ratings of each of her instructors. 

Before she even came to campus, Ugran was checking her instructors’ ratings on the site. A few times she’d check her schedule, and the instructor had been switched.

“I’d be like ‘that’s not who I had! I liked my teacher before even though I’ve never met her,’” says Ugran, a freshman fashion design major. “And I’d check again, and it’d be a not-so-good teacher, and I’d be all bummed.”

Scheduling classes has become a much more complicated process than it has traditionally been now that Ugran’s added Rate My Professors to the equation.

She isn’t just trying to find the class that perfectly fits her daily routine and allows her to sleep in.
She isn’t trying to find the class that will work for whatever concentration she pursues, as she’s still not sure about her major.

She’s trying to find the professor with the best possible ratings, which she says is anything “above a three,” in each of the site’s five categories, including clarity, ease, helpfulness, overall quality and hotness — which is indicated by a single red chili pepper.

Melissa Capretta, sophomore human development and family studies major, has used the Web site every semester of her college career and isn’t really sure what she would do without it.

“If you have a teacher you can’t understand or if other people had problems with them, you probably will too,” she says. “So it’s nice to see what other people have to say.”

When it’s time to register for the next semester’s course load, students make their way to the university’s online schedule of classes. But oftentimes, such as in Ugran’s and Capretta’s cases, FlashFAST isn’t the only Web site loading on students’ computers. RateMyProfessors.com lurks in the background, displaying comments from disgruntled and satisfied students who wish to offer a few last words — often rife with grammatical errors and a few censored obscenities  — about the man or woman who marked up their papers, scored their bubble sheets and bored or captivated them with lectures.

* * *

“WORST PROFESSOR EVER. Is also prejudiced. Uneasy to reach and cannot use the latest technology and blamed US for it. The online quizzes were okay. She went way to fast with the notes. You are better off reading the chpaters beforehand. It’s like she has permanent PMS or something,” gripes one bitter student who offered one professor scores of one in the areas of helpfulness and clarity.

* * *

“Great prof. Cares about his students and goes out of his way to help. Very knowledgable in his field and it shows. Recommend 100%,” suggests one satisfied student.

* * *

“She talks about her cats a lot. but if you look past that she's awesome! She encorporates singing into her lectures, and I always like that because it makes me get into the lectures. Very easy tests and easier book reports. Just do the work and listen and you'll have a good time,” reports one student who rated the professor fives across the board.

* * *

“Mean,Grouchy,Evil in every way,” snaps one angry site user.

* * *

“She is awesome!!! You can really tell she is passionate about her teaching. She'll do what ever you can to help you. Take her class if you can!!”  says one excited student who offered an almost perfect rating.

RateMyProfessors.com offers more than 6.8 million comments for more than a million professors from schools ranging from Howard to Harvard and Kansas to Kent State. A representative from the Web site could not be reached for comment. But it bluntly states its mission on the frequently asked questions portion of the site.

“We are just common, ordinary people who believe that students are the CUSTOMERS of professors — and we believe they absolutely have a right to voice their opinions.”

‘IT SAYS MORE ABOUT THE PERSON DOING THE RATING’

Criticism of Rate My Professors is widespread, and many professors have denounced the use of the site, although many faculty members have admitted to browsing their own ratings. Some of the criticisms that have risen from the site are the scattered amounts of ratings and it doesn’t seek a representative sample, as some professors have almost a hundred and others have fewer than 10.

Patrick Gallagher, associate professor of Spanish who boasts a healthy rating of 3.5 in overall quality, says he doesn’t necessarily have a problem with the site.

“I don’t have any trouble with a site like Rate My Professors, but if a person wants to go that route to figure out what kind of professor they want, I’d recommend that they read critically the comments because you can find out about (the person doing the rating) as well as the professor,” Gallagher says.

For example, on Gallagher’s page on RateMyProfessor.com, his ratings range from straight ones to straight fives. The most common negative comment he gets on the Web site is that he speaks too much Spanish in class, which he says some students equate to being a “crappy” professor but faculty in his department would say is a good quality.

“It says something about me, but I think it says more about the person doing the rating,” Gallagher says.
“Gallagher is anal, demanding, & barely teaches. He carries on dialogues that do nothing for those who need the most help. Since it's absolutely forbidden to speak a word of English, struggling students can't even explain their confusion,” declares one student.
“I LOVE Pat! Super nice in & out of class. True, you aren't allowed to speak English but that's b/c he wants you to learn to improvise! Thought-provoking political/social topics. He's very patient & gives you every opportunity to succeed, if you're willing to put in the effort(worth more than perfection). At least ATTEMPT to talk if you want an A/B,” reports one pleased student.

“I think if students want to try to slide their way through the university based on simply trying to figure out the path of least resistance, the least amount of studying, the path of least serious work, then that’s what they want to do with their money,” he says, adding that the university is an important part in people’s lives, and it can be used in various ways. But he thinks — although idealistic — the best way to use the university is to be challenged. A student shouldn’t just gallivant through higher education by doing the least amount of work.

Ivanka Sabolich, a lecturer in the sociology department who teaches classes with as many as 450 students, nervously asked what her rating was on the site. When told she received a healthy 3.8 rating, she breathed a sigh of relief.

“I tend to dwell on the negatives,” she says of her hesitance to look at the Web site.
 

“As everyone knows, this class is huge. Which generally means, that this class is easy as hell. Which it was. Intro classes are generally easy — its a fact. She reviewed material before tests. I didn't own the book. I didn't own the supplemental reading material. I went to class one (out of three) times a week- if that. I got an A,” reports one student.

“She dresses well and her hair is awesome, but her class is soooo boring,” a student says in his or her rating.

“She is a good teacher. She makes everything clear,” writes a pleased student.

Sabolich has more than 50 ratings on the Web site since 2003, one of the highest response rates in the Kent State category.

“Usually, I think students that go on the site are somehow very pleased or very unhappy,” Sabolich says, adding that this could be a factor in the site’s varying response rates.

Thomas Emmons, professor emeritus of physics, teaches courses with as many as 200 students enrolled. Because he teaches Seven Ideas That Shook the Universe, one of the most popular classes on campus, it’s not surprising that he has one of the highest response rates in the Kent State category with 56.

But the Distinguished Teaching Award he won in 1992 isn’t the only notch on Emmons’ belt — he sports an almost-perfect rating with a 4.7 in overall quality on the site. When informed of the Rate My Professors rating, Emmons enthusiastically remarks, “That just made my day.”

“Great Professor! Very clear and knowledge. The class is well organized and teaches you things that will stay with you a long time. I suggest that you do the workbook and go to class often, and also attend the test reviews,” lauds a former Seven Ideas student.

“Great class. So easy! my favorite class all semester. Prof Emmons is a really great guy, and his demonstrations are really cool,” extols another.

Ugran says she doesn’t necessarily look at the Web site just to find the easiest professor and is not always just looking out for her grade point average because she has to be challenged sometimes and “can’t always expect to have the easiest teacher.” But if there’s one thing she does specifically go to the Web site for is to check the professor’s helpfulness rating.

“Even if it’s going to be hard, I want them to be able to encourage me to learn. And if I had a question that I could be able to find them, and they could give me advice and answer any questions I could have about homework or anything,” Ugran says. “ Because I know college is about learning on your own and everything, sometimes you’ll need the help.”

Benjamin Wiford, senior aeronautical systems engineering technology major, has known about Rate My Professors since his freshman year, but it wasn’t until his sophomore year that he really started using it.

When Wiford showed up for his first English II class of the semester, he encountered what he says was “a pretty crappy professor.” He says the class was “something ridiculous for a sophomore” as the course centered around a more than 20-page research project. He dropped the course and made his way to Rate My Professors to see who would be a better fit.

“I actually found probably the greatest professor in the entire university,” he says. “It was such an easy course, and it worked out pretty good.”

RATING RATE MY PROFESSORS

Despite the criticism geared toward Rate My Professors, according to a recent study done by two professors at The University of Maine, the correlation between some of the ratings on the Web site aren’t that far off from the university’s standard teaching evaluations.

“I was surprised that we got some of the correlations we did,” says Ted Coladarci, educational professor of psychology and one of the authors of the study. “I really went into this thinking Rate My Professors wouldn’t correlate with standard evaluations of teaching,” adding that he actually hoped the site wouldn’t correlate because the site doesn’t use representative samples and not many students actually leave comments.

Coladarci, who bears an overall quality rating on Rate My Professors of 3.1, warns that the correlation between student evaluations of teaching and the ratings on the site aren’t universally high. Professors who score well on Rate My Professors typically do well on student evaluations while the correlation is much weaker for those who score low on the site.

With the results of the study, Coladarci and Irv Kornfield, the other author of the study and a professor of marine sciences, offer two policy implications. The first, which Coladarci said was offered with “some ambivalence” is that institutions should encourage students to consider posting ratings and comments on Rate My Professor.

“The point is that it’s not going to go away. People like those sorts of sources of information,” he says. “One thing a university could do, knowing Rate My Professors isn’t going to go away and that people like it, is to honestly encourage their students to use it responsibly.”

But Coladarci says the emphasis should be on leaving responsible and tasteful comments.

“To me, it’s just not right for students in some cases to express in sarcasm and in insensitivity and inappropriate playfulness in offering their judgments about faculty,” he says. “Nobody benefits from it.”

The other policy implication Coladarci and Kornfield suggest — with “firm resolve,” according to the study — is that universities make the data acquired from student evaluations of teaching available online.

Associate Provost Gayle Ormiston says teaching evaluations are important because they help resolve issues and are useful to the university for promotion purposes. Therefore, students shouldn’t blow off the evaluations.

“It’s important for students to take these evaluations seriously and not in an off-hand fashion because they are useful to the university,” he says, adding that there was some brief discussion a few years ago about making the evaluations public online, but that discussion has since been halted because of the heavy demands on the university’s Office of Research, Planning and Institutional Effectiveness.

As a student, Ugran says putting the teaching evaluations online is something she’d be interested in.

“I’d look at it,” Ugran says. “I’m sure there’d be more responses to read from because sometimes there are only one or two for a teacher and maybe the one will be bad — but you never know if they’re actually decent and you don’t realize it.”

Capretta agrees.

“I think that’d be good because a lot of people don’t really know about (Rate My Professors) and don’t go on it or they’re too lazy to go rate teachers in their free time,” Capretta said. “Since we do (teaching evaluations) at the end of the semester, I think it’d be helpful.”

Faculty Senate Chair Cheryl Casper says to provide this type of data would require a significant amount of university resources. The resources may be stretched thin because of the recent implementation of Banner, the university’s new back-end system that will run FlashLine. Although the information is public record, she says some of the faculty may be a wary of putting it all online.

“I don’t think the faculty would be terribly thrilled,” she says. “But they may recognize the information has some value.”

Wiford says making the evaluations online would be great addition to FlashFAST, which recently replaced Web For Students under the switch to Banner. He says it’d make it easy to go back and forth between the scheduling system and the ratings.

Gallagher says he would be open to discussion about that possibility, but teaching evaluations are very complex, and it’d be hard to categorize the stats online because so many courses aren’t comparable. For instance, he says, a general introduction to psychology course is going to have much different ratings than a class such as elementary Spanish where there is a high level of interaction.

Those are some of the issues, he says, that need to be ironed out.

 “I don’t know how I’d feel,” Gallagher says, adding that his gut reaction is that he doesn’t have any reason against it. “My evaluations aren’t something I feel particularly embarrassed about. “

But Gallagher says if he were a challenging professor, but had a high success rate of students going to graduate school or people becoming completely enamored by the subject, the online evaluations could be somewhat misleading.

Emmons says he’d back the idea of making the evaluations publicly available online in a manageable format.

“I would agree to that 100 percent,” Emmons says. “The students are paying the bill here. They’re paying my salary so I think they should know how I’m doing.”

Despite the possibility of teaching evaluations making it to the university’s Web site, Ugran, a self-confessed addict of the site, says she’d be lost if Rate My Professors vanished.

“Well, it’d have to be how it was before all this came about, and I’ll just have to go with whatever times are good and guess and hope it all turns out OK,” she says about scheduling classes, adding that she wishes she’d known what she was getting into. “And I’d probably ask my friends again so I could repeat some of their teachers if they had good experiences with them.”

Nonetheless, Ugran spent four hours by computer one day trying to figure out what classes to take, shuffling between FlashFAST and RateMyProfessors.com, searching for just the right instructor and avoiding anyone with a rating she deemed unsatisfactory.

“Everyone else just seemed like they scheduled so fast, and was like ‘OK, I’m taking this class,’” she says. “I was like ‘We have to check the teacher! Who cares what time it is?’”

Tim Magaw is a junior newspaper journalism major. This is his first story for The Burr.