Rate My Professors: A Must-Read for Students

Professor X
Nov 8 · 9 min read

When you are done reading, please visit Academic Integrity Group and learn how you can help fight sexism in colleges and stop clickbait profiteers like Rate My Professors. We are calling for a boycott of Rate My Professors. Read on and learn the ugly truth and why this site must be stopped.

Rate My Professors is a scam. Nothing but clickbait exploitation of an entire segment of our population for profit. Do not participate in this unethical and despicable practice.

If you are a student and you use Rate My Professors you are directly contributing to a parasitic clickbait business that is exploiting you and your professors for profit. You are also facilitating sexism and anti-intellectualism, and contributing to the destruction of the student teacher relationship. Worst of all, as a student, you are harming your own education in the process. Is that why you came to college?

“Quality” Just Means “Easy”

In a previous post we presented the data and conclusive evidence that Rate My Professors is nothing more than an easiness rating. “Difficulty” and “Quality” are simply mirrors of each other. Students who rate a class or professor as “easy” also overwhelmingly rate the professor as “high quality.” Students who rate a class or professor as “difficult” also overwhelmingly rate the professor as “poor quality.” Simply put, Rate My Professors is nothing but an easiness rating. When you pick a “high quality” professor you are simply picking an easy professor or an easy field. That may be what you’re after, you may want it easy, but if you think that’s a good way to run your academic career then you’ll get exactly what you deserve: a worthless piece of paper and none of the skills and education to back it up.

Making matters worse, the inverse relationship between “quality” and “difficulty” is much stronger for female professors, and much stronger for math, science, and engineering. Female professors are consistently rated lower than male professors. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math professors are rated far lower than non-STEM fields. When you combine women professors with STEM fields, those female professors are rated 13% lower than their male colleagues!

When you see a professor marked as low quality all you are likely seeing is sexist and poor quality students who couldn’t cut it, and are now blaming their professors for their failures. That’s who you are letting you tell you who is a “good” professor; the sexist and academically weak.

Is that really who you want advising you?

Rate My Professors is Not “For students. By students”

This is a direct quote taken from Rate My Professors

The site does what students have been doing forever — checking in with each other — their friends, their brothers, their sisters, their classmates.

- RateMyProfessors.com

That is a lie. Rate My Professors in no way emulates “checking in” with friends, brothers, sisters, and classmates, and they are not run by college students.

Rate My Professors is anonymous. The comments left behind are not anyone you know. They are not your friends, brothers, sisters, and classmates. The very point of asking friends, brothers, sisters, and classmates is that you know them and you have acquired some measure of trust in their opinion! Rate My Professors is anonymous and you have no idea who is posting, and you’re going to blindly trust that person? Seriously?

Rate My Professors also claims they are “built by students, for students.” Another lie. This is a corporation and their only goal is money. You are being used for clicks, that’s it. Rate My Professors and its parent company, Cheddar, Inc. are parasites. Carlo DiMarco EVP and General Manager of Cheddar, Inc. who is in charge of Rate My Professors is a career profiteer who cares nothing about the integrity of his profit and he is a demonstrated liar (or an incompetent fool who doesn’t know what his product is doing). Mr. DiMarco claims every post is monitored and screened for violations in terms of service. He claims no rude or disparaging comments are allowed on Rate My Professors. In just casual searching we have found hundreds of such posts and can prove no monitoring takes place. We are building a database of these posts and will prove Rate My Professors does not adhere to its own Terms of Service.

Mr. DiMarco says no name calling is allowed. This post is 14 years old. Mr. DiMarco is a liar.
Rate My Professors is unethical and in no way represents truth, ethics, or higher education standards.

Rate My Professors is lying to you, using you, and is nothing more than clickbait nonsense filled with ratings by disgruntled students. In fact, it’s a well known fact in academics that a sizable amount of positive professor ratings are simply professors rating themselves to protect their reputation.

Highly rated professors are likely just rating themselves to protect themselves. Poorly rated professors are likely just targets of sexist and weak students. It’s all a lie. All of it.

Rate My Professors is Unethical

Rate My Professors is unethical in the extreme. When you attend college you are paying for and asking to be taught and “rated” in the form of grades. You asked to be taught and rated. Professors made no such request of you and it is completely unethical and inappropriate for students to rate professors in this manner.

  • Professors have already been where you are. They have already passed through and earned their place. They have already been judged and found worthy to be where they are. Simply put, a student is not qualified to rate a professor. You have not been through what they have and you have not yet earned that right. You don’t know why they are teaching one way or another, and you don’t know what your field demands of you yet. If you did, you’d be the professor. Point being, there are many things a professor may do or not do, or ways they may behave, that is helping preparing you for your field. You shouldn’t be judging them until you have also acquired the knowledge and experience they have and you can look back on it intelligently and fairly.
  • Professors are not businesses. A business is a public endeavor and has obligations to serve anyone who can pay and more to the point, actively attempts to serve anyone that can pay. A professor is professionally and ethically placed behind constraints through which a student must earn the right to the professor’s services. Professors are not public servants nor are they public businesses. Professors are people. People with families, lives, good days, bad days, good semesters, bad semesters, and they don’t deserve to be ranked like pieces of meat or the local oil-change shop. If you participate in this abuse and exploitation of other humans then you have by definition also demonstrated why you are a poor quality person and not qualified to rate a professor.

It’s Not All About You. You’re Making It Worse.

I’m sorry students, but it isn’t all about you. Professors have an obligation not only to the student, but also to their field of study, holding to academic standards, and to their college’s particular mission. Balancing all those factors is difficult at best (go earn a PhD and you try it, let’s see how well you do). College is not elementary or high school. University learning is about fields of study, about the disciplines, and about the total body of human knowledge which professors are entrusted to keep generation to generation. Teaching you is certainly part of that overall mission but unlike a high school or elementary school teacher, it’s only one part of many. When you slam a professor because they weren’t easy or weren’t entertaining enough for you, what you are doing is selfishly negating everything else a professor is here to do. In your world, your current class and your current professor is all you care about, but your professor is responsible for the entire body of knowledge of his or her field and all who enter that field. Without those professors you “hate” so much and want to punish with negative comments, your entire field of study would collapse and you’d have nothing.

The problem arises when a society respects its scholars lesser and lesser and replaces intellectualism with anti-intellectualism. Such society forces the most intellectual members of its, toward alienation and instead develops populism and irrationalism and then calls it anti-elitism. On the other hand, scholars, due to being undermined by the society, find any effort hopeless and isolate themselves into their work.

- Kambiz Shabankare

When you participate on sites like Rate My Professors you are creating an adversarial relationship between students and professors. You are making professors see you as the enemy. Professors are just people. If some group of people insulted and berated you over and over, how would you treat them back? Because of sites like Rate My Professors many professors simply do not care about students anymore. Professors do their jobs worse because of the adversarial dynamic Rate My Professors creates, and then you rate them worse because they care less, and then professors care even less. It’s a vicious and negative cycle that is destroying the student-teacher relationship. Each time you post a bad review, that professor gets more spiteful, more cautious, less likely to cut a student a break, and more likely to not care about you. Maybe the professor you hate this semester was viciously attacked online the previous semester and now that professor treats you worse because they are angry. Do you really want to be a part of this vicious, ugly cycle?

Rate My Professors is a cancer in our academic system. Have some integrity and do not participate and encourage this vile cancer.

Do Unto Others…

There is a saying, and it’s been called the Golden Rule for good reason: “ Treat others as you would have them treat you.” Imagine yourself being rated by your co-workers, bosses, friends, acquaintances, and neighbors for the rest of your life in the way Rate My Professors encourages students to rate professors. Imagine people can anonymously and publicly rate you for anything they like. Your neighbor can say you’re an asshole who doesn’t keep up your lawn, your ex can say you’re lousy in bed, your co-workers can say you’re a slacker and lazy. People can literally make up any lie they want about you. Now imagine all that is anonymous and perfectly organized like a resume so that anyone doing a search for you online will see all that at the top of any search list. Imagine anyone, anywhere can make a personal attack on you, not just haphazardly on social media, but on a site that records, organizes, and legitimizes these attacks. Imagine that site becoming the de-facto standard for people looking to hire you, date you, or interact with you. Don’t like that idea? Then why are you doing it to others?

If you participate in any way on Rate My Professors, what does that say about you as a person? Quite a lot, and none of it is good.

Rate My Professors is an extreme assault on the personal privacy of private citizens. If you don’t think that is going to come back around to haunt you then you’re in for a big surprise. When you find yourself someday on the wrong end of this culture of cowardice and “ratings” systems just remember Rate My Professors and remember you thought it was just fine when it was done to someone else.

If you don’t like the idea of being publicly rated and humiliated, then don’t participate in doing it to other people, especially not to people who have dedicated their lives to trying to help you.

If this is the kind of thing that makes you feel good and empowered, it’s time to re-think your life.

Boycott!

We are calling on all students with ethics and integrity to boycott Rate My Professors. The only thing Rate My Professors offers is inaccurate, worthless, clickbait lies. Be a better person. Be a good student. If you want to evaluate a professor then do what good and ethical students have been doing for hundreds of years in every college and University in the world; go talk to the professor. Engage the professor and learn for yourself. Don’t rely on anonymous cowards, failed students, and a sexist clickbait site for your academic advice.

Professors are there to help you. Talk to them. Professors want to help you, they want you to learn, they genuinely want you to do well, they want you to earn your place with integrity and honesty — even the ones you think “suck” and are “jerks.” Treat them with the same respect with which you would want to be treated and you’ll be surprised how far that will go in your academic career, and in life.

To learn more about what you can do to help, please visit Academic Integrity Group.


Originally published at http://ratingprofessors.com.

Professor X

Written by

Professor X is a group of professors dedicated to bringing integrity higher education, starting with the demise of the trash site known as Rate My Professors.

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