Rate My Professor is a website used to evaluate professors from the student’s perspective. The homepage of this website gives you the option to either type in the name of your institution or look up your professor by name. Here, you can see various students’ feedback on a specific professor, but is there such a thing as taking a review too far? What happens if one student had a great experience with a professor while another, not so much?
Professor of Microeconomics at Loyola University Maryland, Taylor Davis, explained why this website should not necessarily be deemed as an accurate source.
He said, “I have felt strongly about this website, often in the negative. I find it to be very crude and very one-sided. I also don’t think students are seeing the big picture when they look at what an instructor is doing in class. I also feel like students use it as an opportunity to be disgruntled.”
Rate My Professor can appear as a useful resource where students can get feedback about their professors and leave ratings for future students who are planning on taking a class with that specific professor, and there are some students who have felt that the ratings are accurate. David Bierwirth ‘26 said his experience through using this website.
He said, “I think this website is an accurate reflection of teachers overall if the sample size is big enough. There haven’t been any times I thought a rating was wrong, maybe sometimes a bit harsh, but not outright incorrect.”
Once on the Rate My Professor website, you are taken through what is known as a blog for that professor where there are sections labeled “quality” and “level of difficulty.” From here, you can scroll through and view various comments and number ratings given by students on their past or present professors. However, there are other websites such as Niche and Rate my Lecturer that allow you to do almost the same thing. Loyola graduate Jay Venit said how he feels about the website Rate my Professor and how it has changed since he was enrolled in Loyola.
He said, “I remember seeing some comments and definitely feeling like some were incorrect. I suggest people take anything like that with a grain of salt.”
Steven Mesaros ‘26 held a similar viewpoint while using Rate My Professor. He said how he often uses this website when choosing classes for the upcoming semester.
He said, “I use this website all the time. I think Rate My Professor is accurate to an extent. For example, I might not like a professor that you think is a great professor but overall, I think it is a good website.”
Rate My Professor is a platform that is meant to help students get informed on a professor and their class before they choose to take it, while priding themselves on having trustworthy reviews. This website runs on student evaluations to determine the difficulty of the class and its professor.