Rating RateMyProfessor’s Reliability
Nearly 3,000 students at Elmhurst University will be meeting with advisors, asking friends, and browsing online catalogs for their next semester’s academic adventure. One key tool many will also swear by is the website RateMyProfessor.
RateMyProfessor is a free online platform that allows anyone to anonymously review colleges and universities, as well as their professors based on various criteria including course intensity, student interest, and even the attitude of a professor. Users are also given the option to write a short comment to attach to their review, completely anonymously.
Some students refuse to register for classes until they’ve read the RateMyProfessor review for their planned courses. Anecdotally, members of The Leader’s Editorial Board remember being told they should disregard anyone telling them not to use RateMyProfessor.
This does beg a question: how reliable is this website? It’s completely open to the public, and it’s completely anonymous as well. What’s stopping a professor from writing their own reviews? What’s stopping a student who strongly dislikes one professor from writing hundreds of fake negative reviews? What’s stopping one student’s single review from significantly skewing a professor’s score?
It’s about what one would expect. The website provides guidelines for posting on its “Help” page and does contain a moderation team of some sort, but they do not scan or proofread the reviews written, primarily focusing on checking reports and violations submitted by the site’s users instead.
This can lead to some foul play. After browsing the website for some time, students may notice a handful of professors, particularly those teaching “Area of Knowledge” or “Tag” classes, having many reviews phrased very similarly, often using the same first or last sentences and noting the same key points each time.
Of course, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that these reviews really are real students. The primary concern of many students taking general education courses tends to be whether or not they have a lot of homework and how easy the exams are. When reviewing a course where your main observations were exactly that, it’s hard to deviate too far from the standard.
Should RateMyProfessor be trusted then? Even if there isn’t any foul play, EU is not a very large school. Most professors on EU’s RateMyProfessor catalog have 10 or fewer reviews.
Why do people trust Wikipedia? Anyone can edit that website, and though it isn’t very difficult to check a page’s references or view an article’s contributing editors, do people really?
We trust Wikipedia because it has a critical mass of users. There are enough people that use the website, both as contributors and as readers, that the general public can safely rely on the website, at least for very general or broad information.
In this way, RateMyProfessor is very similar. Until end-of-semester course reviews become publicly accessible for students, RateMyProfessor is the only semi-reliable source of student course feedback in one place that is easily accessible online. Students have accepted this platform as their public resource and as such, have collectively decided to keep it relatively accurate.
Conversely, EU is a small university. With roughly 3,000 undergraduate students and only so many classes a student can take, one strongly negative or strongly positive review can skew the overall score of a professor. Two, three, or four can wildly affect that professor’s score. The only way to stop this is for students to be proactive in contributing to the site themselves.
With students using RateMyProfessor as a baseline for their course selection, it should be extremely important for all students to write a genuine and honest review for the classes they take. It only takes a minute or two per professor. The more reviews that are written, the more accurate a professor’s rating becomes, and the more students can shape their EU experiences in the ways they want to.