ALAINA PANGELINA | staff writer
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way of finding good professors for classes? Better than asking all of your friends who may or may not have taken them before? Wait. There is. Rate MyProfessors.com.
I could ask four or five friends about the 10 professors I could take and totally lose sight of who would be best among the various ratings and opinions.
And the classes that you ‘just get through’ have shown me that closing my eyes and pointing somewhere on the computer screen method doesn’t always work.
I personally prefer Rate My Professors to any other method. Sometimes sorting by class time and location still leaves many options open before we even consider the professor.
Therefore, I appreciate how the site blends not just personal testimonies and opinions of classroom settings, but also the ‘cold, hard facts’ of rating our professors.
Clarity. Easiness. Helpfulness. Quality. Interest. Sounds like a good list, or motto even. All of these are things we want in a professor.
We want to understand our professors and feel they are truly there for us.
We want to know their attempts for helping us. We want to know if they care if we pass or fail, if we get the material or are just getting through the class.
The comments section can go both ways.
There were a couple classes I took before I used Rate My Professors and my opinion afterwards matched about half of them. When almost all of the comments say hard, but worth it, I give the class some serious contemplation.
Other classes are guaranteed to be easy, but sometimes you need that one fun class to look forward to each semester.
Something I really appreciate is when the students also give a preview of the course load, something like peeking at the syllabus. You can read how many quizzes, tests, papers or projects there are, how hard students feel they are, how fair they are or how prepared they felt before their finals.
Recently, growth in a different section has emerged: the professors’ rebuttals.
Many feel they are, ironically, unfairly graded. This has in turn led to studies being done on the reliability of ratings on the site, and the concept of a first impression being based off of something online.
However, I am inclined to agree with people like Professor Edward B. Nuhfer at Idaho State University.
“[Some institutions] use student evaluations as the defining measure of success,” Nuhfer’s study states.
Another important thing to consider is the target of the site and how and if they benefit from it.
While some say it does no more good for students than asking around, others feel it is student’s right to try and get the best professor possible by whatever means necessary.
The president of Rate My Professors believes it to simply be a site fulfilling the needs and rights of students.
Indeed, to not at least consult the site seems a waste of resources.
A site that compiles opinion, traits, and trends of the people who will be teaching us for 12 to 15 weeks seems a site worth reviewing.
