An Assessment of American Hospitality Programs Based on RateMyprofessor: A Big Data Approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT While research on course evaluations and professors’ performance in Western higher education has been gaining increasing scholarly attention, a big data approach that focuses on specific disciplines such as hospitality and tourism has remained scarce. The current study explores the ratings and reviews of professors from top hospitality programs in the United States, as given by the online platform RateMyProfessor. The purpose of this exploratory study is to use hospitality professors’ ratings, rankings, and textual reviews to understand their performance and overall university rank in the eyes of the students. Furthermore, sentiment analysis was conducted on the textual reviews, aiming to identify recurring positive and negative themes. The findings of this study reveal that the majority of the reviews were positive, identify the highest- and lowest-rated professor characteristics and main complaints, as well as provide future guidelines on improvement.