Friday, September 22, 2006

As college students nationwide know well, the Internet is both a procrastination aid and an academic resource. RateMyProfessors.com is one site which has the potential to be a valuable resource to students across the country by allowing them to anonymously grade their professors on a one-to-five scale with respect to overall quality and easiness in grading and workload. Although the university’s course-listings Web site provides students with ratings, syllabi and other methods to research courses prior to registration, RateyMyProfessors.com transcends those tools in the categories of comprehensiveness (857 professors from the university are currently listed) and student participation. Despite this fact, several structural shortcomings of the site should be considered when choosing to use the site to help select one’s course schedule. Since the site has no method of determining whether a student has actually taken a particular professor’s course, the accuracy of the ratings system is questionable. Furthermore, the number of ratings can vary from professor to professor depending on both popularity and how long they have been teaching; hence, a new professor can have one bad rating from one student, causing other students to base their course selection upon a single negative rating. Finally, the amount of effort put into the ratings can differ greatly: Some ratings describe the professor’s style of teaching in detail, but others are simply ad hominem attacks from angry students. In short, the Web site fails to consider that different students seek out different types of learning experiences. Some students seek out challenging professors who assign more work, and others seek out professors who teach “gut” courses which guarantee an easy A. Thus, a fantastic but tough professor can be poorly rated by a student who failed to get his A. Nevertheless, RateMyProfessors.com could become a valuable tool for students, provided the site is used properly. By posting more ratings which contain useful details, the accuracy of the site can be improved. RateMyProfessors.com is only one avenue by which course research can be accomplished, and students should take this to heart when making decisions about their future coursework at Georgetown.