Ratemyprofessor Review
As students journeying to new schools, and meeting new teachers, you may
want to know what you're getting yourself into. Those who need to use
their hard-earned money or take out loans should especially be skeptical
to prevent a stressing mistake. Investing time or money in a school is in
itself a business, and everything should to the best of the individual(s)
effort(s) run as smooth as possible. So, the question here is how
reliable, and accurate can ratemyprofessor be? Is it just a bunch of angry
students out for revenge or are they really putting time, and thought into
their critcisms for the schools, and what's to be expected? First let's
see what ratemyprofessor actually is.
Ratemyprofessor intent
Ratemyprofessor was an alternated site brought up in 2001-2 aimed mostly
towards students in college. It's purpose is to allow people to check up
on what their school/teacher has to offer, and how well they deliver. If
you're curious about a destined professor then you may find the person,
and see how well he handles his classes. You're also able to get an insite
of the school from others who have previously attended. The area of focus
is mostly the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom. With other benefits as
planning a class schedule or getting into personal contact with those who
are involved in your curiosity, this site has a very well intention, and
bases for helping young students. But, a site full of everyones opinion
can't be the most accurate can it? There may be issues with spite, maybe a
lack of ground to criticise or maybe just different experiences. It's
usually the few out of the large crowd who give a fair response correct
response, right? Let's see.
How trustworthy is it?
Now the site itself is still a brilliant idea, but it's up to the content,
the students, to make it as fairly judged as possible. So how does it hold
up? Students who attend can rate their class from 1-5 with added words
such as easiness, helpfulness, clairty, interest, and textbook use.
Although these will be use, they always seem to slope from all smiley face
(high rating) or just simply frowny face (bad rating). With a limited
attention getter with the ratings, and easiness, clarity, and helpfulness
being the more important factors. The problem is as quoted from Nuhfer,
Edward who says that Edward Nuhfer says that, "Both Pickaprof.com and RMP
"are transparently obvious in their advocacy that describes a 'good
teacher' as an easy grader. ... Presenter Phil Abrami...rated the latter
as 'The worst evaluation I've seen' during a panel discussion on student
evaluations at the 2005 annual AERA meeting." A study of RMP ratings
conducted by James Felton found that "the hotter and easier professors
are, the more likely they’ll get rated as a good teacher." Edward Nuhfer
has argued, "Pseudo-evaluation damages the credibility of legitimate
evaluation and victimizes individuals by irresponsibly publishing comments
about them derived from anonymous sources. This is voyeurism passed off as
'evaluation' and examples lie at http://www.pickaprof.com/ and
http://ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp. Neither site provides evaluation of
faculty through criteria that might be valuable to a student seeking a
professor who is conducive to their learning, thinking or intellectual
growth."
And maybe the worse is that the site is infact allowed to delete comments
they find negative which only lessens the credibility. And for a sites purpose, which is to give credible information on the certain aspects, it seems a very poor choice to even tamper with the comments. Unless it's robot spam, a comment mentioning a professor sucks, is the same as a comment saying a professor is great.
My experience with ratemyprofessor
For me, ratemyprofessor is a great system which also involves great flaws.
If you want reliable information, then you need to dig, and find comments
that don't just throw out a 5 rating or a 1. There are 5 numbers for a
reason, and 5 is definitely close to godliness, and if someone is just
handing those out then they're really not the right person to listen to.
Just dig enough for how badly you need the info, and the ratemyprofessor
should be a great asset for use, although nowadays you can find other
great programs.
ratemyprofessor
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