Some Things, You're Better Off Not Knowing … Thoughts on RateMyProfessors.com

Abstract

CHECK THE WEBSITE, tell yourself you're looking for someone else or you're looking as joke. Find yourself. Experience moment of heart stopping anxiety as you click the link on your name: self-obsessed clothes boring gives f*? stupidest waste of time stuck-up snob teaching useless crap cares take this class!!! There might be positive things written about you--but this isn't going to be what you remember. It's the nasty stuff that sticks. How do you feel? A hole in the pit of your stomach ... didn't you not publish anything at all this year because you've been slaving away at the prep for this course? Didn't you assign long-format writing to give students chance to really stretch ... and thus stretch out your marking? Didn't you paste on that smile every day knowing you were walking into hostile room of non-majors who would rather just text-message smileys to each other than learn business writing? Why the hell are you doing this anyways? Why don't I come right out and say it: my ranking on RateMyProfessors awful. Really bad. I've earned one of those little grey faces and an overall ranking (as of today) of 2.4, and hotness quotient of zero, based on evaluations submitted by twenty-four students, mostly between September and March 2006. On the rating of The site's creators tout RateMyProfessors as tool of student empowerment, helping undergraduates to better navigate undergraduate course selection (About us). But does it actually help anyone to choose their courses? I asked my current students about this in class. When queried directly about RMP, most look vaguely appalled that I know about it or that I might think that they use it to pick courses. After this discussion, in the relative privacy of my office hour, some of my students stop by to tell me with nervous sympathy that my ranking on that site is pretty bad and that I probably shouldn't look at it. I'm touched, if little uncomfortable, with these students' concerns with my self-esteem, but little self-searching suggests that they were not too far off the mark in reading my response to the site as primarily emotional. I'm surprised to discover that some--most--of my reactions to my rankings are completely personal rather than professional. Such reactions, though, are coded into RMP itself, even as it claims the moral high ground of promoting transparency in education. In nearly the same breath as RMP founder John Swapceinski claims that millions of students use the site to help plan their class schedules, and improve the quality of their educations, the press release in which he makes this statement describes the student submissions as constituting a public review (and sometimes public flogging) of university professors and promotes the feature that allows students to see who the hottest are at their school, as well as read the top 15 funniest ratings (RMP About us). Ultimately, I find that these reviews--unsystematic, impossible to verify for authenticity, taken not at all seriously by university administrations, and often treated as joke by students themselves (Westhues, Romanowska)--provoke such anger and anxiety in me because ... they hurt my feelings. While on some level, the creators and raters on this site may indeed be attempting to redress the opacity of teacher evaluation and honestly spotlight truly great or poor teachers, at base RMP most successful as an entertainment: place to rant, to fantasize, to pass the time, to let fly the resentment and tension that build in the course of difficult and challenging education. That this process now happens online in publicly accessible forum in which the targets of such venting can eavesdrop the only major innovation in an otherwise time-honoured tradition of gossiping about the larger-than-life figures that seem to control student destiny: professors. …