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Document ActionsRateMyProfessors.com?What students and professors thinkIt’s time to register for spring classes, if you haven’t already. To help you decide, will you use RateMyProfessors.com? Launched in 1999, the website is the largest online listing of professor ratings. Visitors can review a professor’s “scorecard,” which compiles student ratings on a scale of one to five (five being the highest) in several categories: overall quality, average clarity, average helpfulness and average easiness. Reviewers can also write comments. Berkeley students have reviewed more than 2,000 faculty and lecturers; of those, more than 80 are in engineering. There are no official numbers on how many student engineers use the site, but here’s a random sampling of what students and professors think. EECS junior Chris Lay: “I don’t use the site to decide my classes. Ratings found on the HKN (EE honors society, Eta Kappa Nu) website are much more complete and, in my experience, accurate. But I put very little stock in any statistics with fewer than five entries.” EECS graduate student Ilya Gurin: “I only use the site if I’m not sure whether I really want to take a class and can’t get better information from another site. I find that Tau Beta Pi’s reviews are more helpful for engineering classes.” (Gurin says he’s also reviewed professors on RateMyProfessors.com.) ME professor Panos Papadopoulos (rated 4.3) says he doesn’t mind the site but puts far more weight on the departmental evaluations. “This is where instructors have an opportunity to review responses to focused questions, which really help improve the quality of teaching.” MSE professor Ron Gronsky (rated 5) also relies more on departmental evaluations. He says he’s never visited the website but has heard of it. IEOR adjunct professor Jon Burgstone (rated 4.8) says he loves the concept. “I think additional student feedback leads to better teaching. I wish more students would participate.” |
