RateMyProfessors

I am constantly on this site when class enrollment season rolls around. I go to a small college where often times many sections of the same class are offered. A lot of times college students can feel a bit lost when trying to put together the best schedule they can.

Ratemyprofessor.com helps me chose the teacher that best fits my needs. It is better than asking my fellow students about certain professors because often they do not know about specific professors, value different qualities in a professor, or may be trying to get in to the same class that I am (and therefore give false information to dissuade me from enrolling in to that class).

I ALWAYS search a prospective professor on this site before enrolling in to his/her class. That way, I can either avoid a bad teacher or if I have no other choice but to enroll in a tough class, I can at least prepare myself for a huge workload (and perhaps take easier classes to distress my school schedule).

It is a useless website that allows the disgruntled and lazy students to vent their anger on professors and blame their professors for students' laziness and failure.

There are excellent things about this site. Allowing a person to see previous students' reviews of a professor (and sometimes class) can be genuinely helpful as you pick between different professors.

However, there are a few issues. (1) The samples are inevitably skewed. Only a few students ever post reviews... and professors have hundreds, even thousands of students, depending on how long they've been teaching. That's just something to keep in mind as you're considering reviews. Really negative reviews might be from particularly pissed off students, so if there's only a few of them, it might not mean anything. (2) The site acts like being easy is a good thing. I don't know about anyone else, but easy classes are a waste of my time and money. So, if you rank a professor as being hard, it drags down their overall rating... which is just not cool. (3) You can give professors "chilly peppers" if you think they're hot. Seriously? (4) Not all professors have reviews.

Overall, though, this site is a great resource. I've used it a lot over the years. Just be sure to take the info you find with a grain of salt... and ignore low scores before you check why they're low. No good professor is going to have a perfect ranking.