Welcome to ratemystudents.com

By William C. Dowling

I first discovered "ratemyprofessors.com" last fall during pre-registration, when the Rutgers student newspaper ran an article about students choosing courses for next term. "Before I register for the spring semester," one sophomore told the Targum reporter, "I make sure I check out the site. It's a great way to find out about the course and professors."

Rutgers students weren't alone in their enthusiasm. "The site seems to be a useful and informal way of getting to know the professor," declared a faculty member in our art history department. Intrigued, I arranged to call up the site on a friend's computer so I could see exactly what sort of valuable information Rutgers students were gaining from ratemyprofessors.com. The answer came as a revelation.

Just a few minutes' worth of scrolling revealed the magic. The site allowed students to weigh in on matters ignored on university-sponsored teaching evaluations. Indeed, the remarks on ratemyprofessors.com quickly made conventional teaching evaluations seem hopelessly stodgy. Posting anonymously, students were able to express themselves usefully and informally, as my art history colleague put it, about the issues in academic life that really matter.

The personal appearance of the professor, for instance. "She's old and dying and dresses like she was eighteen," said a student about one of my English department colleagues. Similar comments abounded: "She's always scratching her eye and making some sort of noise doing it"; "Has a forehead like a drive-in movie theater"; "wore really funny glasses and a hunting jacket and galoshes every day."

Ratemyprofessors.com didn't fussily insist, as some professors still do, on college-level spelling and punctuation. Instead, the site posted student opinions in all their refreshing spontaneity, just as they were written. "If you don't get it, your [sic] screwed," wrote one student. "No resitation [sic], horrible book, and he mummbles [sic]." "What a condoscending [sic] know-it-all," protested another. "I think she has some deep seeded [sic] problems," said another, no doubt a psychology major. "He definately [sic] has favorites," reported a history major. "She is increadibly [sic] boring," lamented an English major.

Another great advantage of ratemyprofessors.com was that it let students respond to outmoded expectations about classroom civility. Standing in front of the classroom, we professors too often forget how powerless students can feel when attention is drawn to what they see as perfectly natural behavior.

If you're absorbed in a video game at the back of a calculus class, what can you do when the teacher asks you to shut it down and listen to the lecture? If you've overslept and walk into the classroom 40 minutes late, what comeback do you have when the professor glares at you from the podium? When you've just begun to get into the latest Busta Rhymes release on your Ipod, how are you supposed to respond when the professor stops lecturing and you open up your eyes to find the whole class staring at you?

Ratemyprofessors.com gives students an opportunity to warn others about classroom tyrants. "She is constantly putting people on blast [sic] for coming to class late," one student reported. "Would yell across the auditorium ‘where are you going?' if you got up to leave," said another. "If she sees you with a computer, she'll yell at you," protested a student in a French course. Again, there were scores of similar comments: "Make sure you don't read the newspaper in class, or else he will made you exit."

Nor was this all. Ratemyprofessors.com let students share valuable strategies for getting through classes that bored them: "I just did other work and wrote friends some letters, but the work isn't hard. I still pulled a B with only reading 2 out of like 6 books"; "I wore headphones and passed notes. I also did my math homework. I even remember playing hangman"; "Good teacher if you wanna get the crossword done"; "Boring. Everyone cheats on quizzes. I didn't read anything (listened to music all the time) and got a B+."

Not least among the things I learned from reading hundreds of comments on ratemyprofessors.com. was that low grades were totally unconnected to a student's academic performance. Instead, I discovered, they were invariably the result of bias or incompetence on the part of the teacher: "Out to screw students. Unrealistic exam expectations. Does not curve. Stay far far away"; "Her idea of an A paper is crap"; "I went to every single class and took great notes and studied a lot and only pulled a D"; "Terrible terrible teacher. I've had the head of the English department at my school where I am now tell me that I'm a talented and well structured [sic] writer. I got a C- in her class."

In the face of such treatment by unreasonably demanding teachers, ratemyprofessors.com gives students a welcome chance to warn others away: "He screwed me on my paper because he couldn't handle the fact that I knew more about my topic than he did"; "Makes up words to sound smart. I have no idea what she is saying"; "Exams are hard as sh*t. He sucks"; "Three hard midterms. Don't take him!! I warn you! But if you have no choice – don't make the mistake of not reading!!!!!!! He ruined my GPA!"; "The f*cker scheduled an exam on homecoming and wouldn't let anyone take it early!"

In the same way, the site lets students make comments about professors who refuse to come down to their own level. One of them seemed to me to sum up the spirit of ratemyprofessors.com as a whole: "Someone needs to remove the stick that is wedged in her ass and insert a dick that might change her high and mighty attitude."

The illumination provided by ratemyprofessors.com didn't stop there. After just one visit, I realized that the website suggested a perfect solution to a problem that professors at large universities like mine face every term: oversubscribed classes. At Rutgers, for instance, early sign-up during pre-registration is reserved for students with the largest number of course credits.

The rationale is to give seniors, who have the least amount of time before graduation, first shot at fulfilling course requirements. But the unhappy side effect is that large numbers of freshmen, sophomores, and juniors routinely get shut out. As my students tell me, it's a common and depressing experience to get up before sunrise, rush to your computer to snag one of the few remaining places in a class, and meet a screen saying "Course Closed."

When this happens, a Rutgers student's only hope of getting into a closed course is to approach the professor directly and ask for a special permission number. During preregistration, Rutgers professors are besieged by hordes of students requesting entry.

Although you try to grant as many special permission numbers as you reasonably can, there's a limit to what you can do. Some semesters, I've had to turn down as many as 30 or 40 students. But the real problem for professors is this: if you grant permission on a first-come, first-served basis, how are you supposed to know anything about the students you've admitted?

It's no solution simply to check a student's grade-point average or list of past courses. The transcript will give you that. How do you obtain the unofficial information that professors really need?

Without some kind of guidance, you're almost certain to let in lazy or insolent or dishonest students while turning down students you later discover to be bright and decent and intellectually engaged, the kind who are a joy to have in class. But what if there were a web site that let professors tell each other about prospective students? In a flash, the idea for ratemystudents.com was born.

When I mentioned the idea to my own students, I learned that there was already one site—it's called rateyourstudents.com—that does allow professors to post comments. But one look showed that its rules make the exercise meaningless. Rateyourstudents.com doesn't let professors list the names of the students who have behaved atrociously in class or cheated on exams or manipulated the grievance machinery of the Office of Student Affairs to try to avoid penalties for not having done any work.

To provide any really meaningful counterpart to ratemyprofessors.com, ratemystudents.com would have to fulfill two basic criteria: (1) professors would have to be able to post anonymously, to offer them the same protection against harassment or retaliation that ratemyprofessors.com offers students, and (2) students would have to be listed by name, so that other faculty members could identify them before letting them into the classroom.

Imagining a site that met these two criteria, I found it very easy to sketch out what the new rating system would look like. Doodling in a notebook one day before office hours, I made up a bunch of evaluations that simply applied to imaginary students the same sort of comments I'd been reading about my colleagues on ratemyprofessors.com:

Florence Faragus. Obsessive and obnoxious grade-grubber. Zero interest in learning or personal intellectual development, cares only about "keeping her GPA up." Try to convince her to take another class, unless you've got hours to spend explaining why you took off ¼ point on a quiz answer.

Larry Langusta. Notorious cheater. Cheated flagrantly on midterm and final, then came in during office hours to boast that his father was currently suing two other faculty members who turned him in for academic dishonesty. Keep him out of your class by any means necessary.

Casey Castleton. Says "like" constantly. Couldn't utter a grammatically complete English sentence to save her life. Avoid her, unless you, like, want to, like, have class discussion, like, stalled out for 20 minutes every time she, like, raises her hand.

Warren Winkle. Nearly illiterate. Spelling and punctuation abysmal. Writing totally ungrammatical. Very combative: stridently insists that the difference between its and it's "doesn't matter when you're in college." If he comes to your office hours, pretend that a family emergency has forced you to cancel.

Everett Evans. A human vegetable. Wears a baseball cap turned backwards in the classroom. Puts his feet up, closes eyes, listens to his Sony Walkman, answers "huh?" when called on. Says he "needs the credits" when you ask him to drop the class.

Oliver Ogletree. Slimy character. Never does assignment, keeps offering "opinions" in class discussion to cover up for not having done the reading. Comes up after class to ask for "clarification" of points he didn't understand, then nods over-energetically to show how brilliant your explanations are. Tells you in great confidence how he's "taken care of" teachers who gave him low grades by making vicious comments about them on ratemyprofessors.com.

What startled me, though, was that when I showed samples of the "ratings" I'd made up to various colleagues around campus, some of them took them to be real descriptions of students they'd actually taught. "You had him too?" exclaimed one man who rushed into my office brandishing the description of "Larry Langusta." "He was in my Modern Fiction class," this teacher told me. "Worst term of my life." Other colleagues took the comments to be ratings from a really existing web site.

"Where do I go to see these ratings?" another man asked me excitedly. "I'm handing out special permission numbers right now. I don't want to give out another one until I've seen that site." When I told him that ratemystudents.com was an imaginary project, a jeu d'esprit prompted by a newspaper article, he was crestfallen.

Responses like these make me think that ratemystudents.com is an idea whose time has come. Since I've got classes to prepare and books to write, I can't set up such a website myself. So I hereby offer the idea to any ambitious dot.com entrepreneur who wants to make the same kind of easy money that ratemyprofessors.com is now raking in.

After all, there would be banner ads and links and pop-up screens for companies who want to sell products to faculty members who'd be drawn to the site. But even more profitably, the site would almost certainly attract millions of students who, having had the chance on ratemyprofessors.com to give their opinions of faculty members anonymously and with perfect impunity— "Someone needs to remove the stick that is wedged in her ass and insert a dick that might change her high and mighty attitude"—would now, at last, have a chance to see what their professors really think of them.