Document Type

Conference Presentation

Publication Date

5-19-2006

Abstract

Ratemyprofessors.com (RMP) is a database that allows students to voice and share their opinions about their university and college teachers. The evaluation website allows students to rate their teachers after the student identifies the class, the level of interest the student has in the class, and the date they are posting the evaluation. They can rate the professors on difficulty, helpfulness, and clarity and post general comments. Online since 1999, RateMyProfessors now contains over 4,200,000 ratings for professors from 5242 schools. Students do use this source, but should they? Is it just gossip or does it have useful information for students choosing their courses? Should advisors lead students to this database? Do students use it to inform their decisions or merely to plan workloads in upcoming semesters? What motivates students to post entries? What motivates students to use the database? What teacher qualities are they trying to avoid? Is the database electronic gossip? Does it matter? I wanted to explore student opinions about RateMyProfessors.

Department

Library Services

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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