ANDREW SHORTALL | staff writer
Whenever anyone tells me how horrible a movie or event is before I see or attend it myself, I always go into it with a negative outlook.
This only makes me focus on the negative more, making it evident or causing me to create biased perceptions.
This is the problem posed to students who use Web sites to rate their future professors such as RateMyProfessors.com. They are relying on an anonymous source’s interpretation of a professor’s teaching style.
To be honest, I am not too familiar with RateMyProfessors.com so I am going to work my way through the site and let you know what I think.
Well, RateMyProfessors.com is asking me to evaluate my teacher on seven different categories, and most of them make sense.
Listed categories are helpfulness, clarity, textbook use, interest level and easiness.
Wait, what is this? RateMyProfessors.com is asking me to list my professor as “hot” or “not.” This is just odd. What does this have to do with the quality of their teaching?
Oh, I get it. If enough people say a professor is hot he or she will get a chili pepper placed next to their name. No doubt this would be the highlight of one’s professional career.
A recent study entitled “Does RateMyProfessors.com Really Rate My Professor?” by James Otto, Douglas A. Sanford Jr. and Douglas N. Ross, showed students relying on sites like Rate My Professors to develop expectations about their professors and class load.
Obviously, the first problem here is that comments are coming from anonymous sources, who are not held to what they say, which decreases the credibility of their statements immediately.
Personal preferences are different from person to person. One person might find the way a professor runs a class refreshing, while another finds it disorganized.
It is illogical to trust that someone’s personal preference will perfectly align with your own.
The risk is even there when asking your close friends how they enjoyed a class, but it is much greater when taking it from an anonymous person on the “information superhighway,” where people are not held accountable for their claims.
The research done by Otto, Sanford Jr. and Ross also showed the ratings students give to their professors are often faulty.
Only a handful of students evaluate their professors on these sites, which creates a selection bias.
Often, the ratings submitted are fueled by emotion, with only people on the opposite ends of happiness or anger taking time to rate their professors out of satisfaction or out of spite.
This means people who use this website as a foundational basis for their professors only see the different extremes.
All of these different factors show Rate My Professors may not be as reliable as students may wish.
When it comes to rating professors, it really must be done on a person to person basis..
