When students register for their classes, it is important for them to know how good the professor for a certain class is, and for that, they have Rate My Professors. The website’s teacher ratings can be very useful for students, but sometimes the negative reviews can be painful for teachers to read, and need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Rate My Professors is not a small website, either. According to the site’s About page, colleges in America, Canada and the United Kingdom are represented, with 15 million reviews of about 1.7 million professors. If someone teaches in those countries, chances are that professor has been rated on this website.

The plethora of professors who have been rated on the site means it is a very useful tool students can use when choosing their classes. In fact, at Sacramento State alone, 1,820 professors have been rated.

However, out of all those teachers, the highest rated professor only has 92 ratings even though there are nearly 30,000 students at Sac State. That number falls drastically and levels out at roughly 50 ratings for the more popular professors.

“(The ratings) are an accurate measurement of the thoughts of the students who entered them, at the time they entered them, in response to those particular questions. They are not statistically valid,” said mathematics professor Scott Farrand.

The ratings are simply anecdotes of students’ experiences in any given professor’s class, and those stories can be extremely biased due to students only going out of their way to review teachers they really enjoyed or really disliked. And when Internet anonymity and negative emotions mix, people can become cruel.

“Some of the comments were not worded in a polite way. I go out of my way not to look at Rate My Professor because it has the reputation as being a place where hurtful comments are regularly made, whether or not the professor deserves them,” said associate criminal justice professor Jennie Singer.

“Instructors are more likely to be concerned about this website. It is very public and can easily mischaracterize some aspects of their teaching. When it is inaccurate, for students it is just misinformation, but for the professor it can be personal and humiliating,” Farrand said.

The main problems with Rate My Professors are the hateful comments and the low statistical value of the reviews. However, the website does provide some valuable information for students.

“It’s helpful for students to get some idea from other students about things like the amount of reading, attendance expectations, exams, professor’s teaching style, etcetera, so I see a value in the website,” said sociology professor Ellen Berg.

Students do not want to go into a class without knowing anything about the professor for that class, but polling their friends is only going to yield a sample size even smaller than the one the website represents. By having a service like Rate My Professors, which organizes a teacher’s qualities and rates each one, students are receiving valuable information about choosing their schedules.

Every semester, each department at Sac State has its students anonymously evaluate their teachers, yet those evaluations are not posted online. Given the benefits of the website, the problems still need to be addressed, and posting those evaluations on the Sac State website for all to see will give professor ratings more legitimacy than the ratings on Rate my Professors.

Berg, Singer and Farrand all made a point to say they already pay attention to the student evaluations and try to improve their individual teaching styles based off the results, so posting them to the Internet would benefit everyone involved.

Granted, the official evaluations are likely too complicated to be easily read on the Internet, so they would need to be truncated into a format similar to Rate my Professors. If the results were easy to read and comprehensive, that service would very likely be quite popular among the student population, as long as the abusive comments were filtered out.

Since the Internet’s anonymity tends to cause people to be crueler towards each other than in the real world, as demonstrated with the comments on Rate My Professors, filtering out the site’s abusive comments could be the best way to please both professors and students.