College students might act like they respect professors in class, but you can find out how they really feel in online forums.
"Your pillow will need a pillow."
"Boring! But I learned there are 137 tiles on the ceiling."
"I learned how to hate a language I already know."
Such are some of the comments posted on RateMyProfessors – a 6-year-old site that archives student critiques of most popular and least liked profs. With a database of more than 4 million ratings at more than 5,000 institutions of higher learning, the website has become a staple for many college students who use it to choose classes based on professors' evaluations.
While the site is ridiculously popular with students, university administrators and professors are finding it neither funny nor instructive. John Swapceinski, the site's founder, says he gets lawsuit threats "pretty much on a weekly basis" (though no actual suits), for publishing allegedly defamatory comments.
Swapceinski, who started the site as a student at San Jose State University, still runs RateMyProfessors while juggling a day job as a Java programmer. But that could change once an agreement to sell the site to book trading startup SwitchTextbooks.com for an unspecified seven-figure sum becomes final.
In the meantime, Swapceinski is also building up a site called Ratingz.net, where people can evaluate professionals in fields like accounting, law and real estate. None of the categories, however, have come close to attracting the posting volume – or the negative feedback – of RateMyProfessors.
Professors – who are accustomed to giving out the grades – don't appreciate seeing their own skills evaluated in a highly public forum.
"By and large, RateMyProfessors is unmentionable in university administrations," said Kenneth Westhues, a sociology professor at the University of Waterloo who completed a study of the rating site last year. "Many professors won't even admit that they look at their ratings on the website."
Westhues finds that professors and administrations are "deeply threatened" by the site in part because work with students has generally been a very minor part of a faculty member's evaluation. When doling out grants of tenure, promotions and raises, universities look mainly at a professor's scholarship and publications. But RateMyProfessors, Westhues said, is forcing administrations to take a professor's teaching capability more seriously.
"Here's this tenured professor with high rank and high salary and students say he's a disaster in the classroom," he said. "RateMyProfessors gets that information out into the open."
But the trouble with that, critics say, is there's no guarantee it's accurate.
"Anyone can contribute ratings, whether they know how to rate someone effectively or not and whether they are enrolled in the class or not," said Chet Robie, associate professor of management and organizational behavior at Wilfrid Laurier University.
At his university, Robie said he and many of his colleagues suspect that one faculty member has been doctoring colleagues ratings to make his or her own appear more favorable. Across RateMyProfessors, he believes there is more than enough defamatory material to launch a class action suit against the site and the people posting the offensive comments.
Swapceinski disagrees. He said the site filters out obscene language, deletes multiple posts on professors that appear to be coming from the same computer, and signs up volunteer student administrators to monitor comments posted at their universities.
Patrick Nagle, president and CEO of SwitchTextbooks also believes legal threats are toothless.
"Our protection really lies with the First Amendment," said Nagle who used the site as an undergraduate at Towson University in Maryland. He's buying RateMyProfessors to generate traffic for SwitchTextbooks.
Ratings are based on a professor's easiness, helpfulness and clarity. Scores go from a low of one to a high of five, and also include written comments. Contributors can also post a chili pepper icon to signify if a professor is "hot."
While critical posts get a lot of attention, positive comments seem to outnumber negative ones, according to Katherine Coynor, a site administrator and history student at the University of South Carolina.
Other sites, like Pick-A-Prof, ProfessorPerformance and Rate A Prof, serve a similar niche. According to Westhues, however, none have nearly the reach of RateMyProfessors.
The site's popularity hasn't gone unnoticed by academic publications. This spring, two professors at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, published a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication following a survey of students who used RateMyProfessors. The authors found that students with neutral opinions of professors were far less likely to post than those with extremely positive or negative views.
Westhues sees the thirst for power as a chief motive for students who post ratings.
"Students are utterly dependent on the professor for the marks that go on the transcript," he said. "But RateMyProfessors gives the student the opportunity to tell the whole world what he or she thinks of the professors."
Robie believes universities would be better off collecting formal faculty ratings and disclosing them only to students.
Swapceinski, who got the idea to start RateMyProfessors following a bad experience with a professor at San Jose State, doesn't think that's a bad idea. However, he fears students would withhold negative opinions if the university is the one collecting evaluations.
But Robie insists there's a better solution than putting evaluations online for the world to see.
"What other job are your performance records up to public scrutiny?" he asked. "Just because many professors are being paid by taxpayers, does that mean they give up all rights to privacy?"
