How does student use of Rate My Professor affect Cuesta professors?

With over nine million monthly users, it’s safe to say that the website, Rate My Professor, is a beloved tool for many college students across the US, Canada and the U.K.

Created in 1999 by California-based software engineer John Swapceinksi, Rate My Professor allows students to search for professors by name or school, read detailed, anonymous reviews from past students, and see scaled ratings that cover things like difficulty of the course, the accessibility and response time of the professor, as well as the likelihood you would take the professor again.

The Professional Leadership Institute reported in 2019 that, “Rate My Professor is arguably the authority in professor rating websites, with over 8,000 schools and 1.8 million professors rated across 20 million ratings.”

With more students using the site than ever before, thanks to growing accessibility to technology, it begs the question, is this a one-way road?

Does the ease offered to students in having more control and choice in their college experience have a downside for those on the other side: the professors, and more specifically, Cuesta College professors?

The answers are nuanced.

One of the biggest worries for professors is that Rate My Professor reviews have the potential to affect enrollment rates for their courses.

While enrollment rates often do not directly affect a professor’s individual pay, they have an indirect effect on their school’s financial health, which in turn influences faculty salaries and employment at their institution. 

“General education professors don’t have to worry as much about their reviews affecting enrollment rates due to the consistent need for those classes,” said Professor John Arno, head of the TV, Film & Electronic Media department at Cuesta said. “It’s the major specific or elective professors that do.” 

For these professors or adjunct faculty members whose classes are more niche, mixed or poor reviews on Rate My Professor could affect their enrollment rates, and, in extreme cases, force them to cancel courses altogether. 

This could also be a problem for new professors who are in their first few years of teaching at an institution and haven’t received reviews yet, or have received a few that aren’t particularly high. 

“I have been teaching for 23 years, and I think I have around 100 Rate My Professor reviews. It’s not a lot, for two decades of teaching, right?” Psychology Professor and Chair of the Kinesiology Department at Cuesta Katy Dittmer said. “So imagine somebody who’s only been teaching for five years. They’re growing and adjusting and taking in the feedback, and this one piece of data doesn’t fully capture that.” 

“I think it’s valuable for students to know that teachers change too,” Dittmer said.

Dittmer, who is one of the highest-rated faculty members on Rate My Professor at Cuesta, has experienced firsthand how professor review sites can be places of hostility and harm

At a university that had its own version of Rate My Professor, a student left Dittmer a review using threatening and dangerous language. 

The review was found by Dittmer’s husband on a whim when he decided to look up her evaluations for that semester. The police were involved due to the severity of the threat.

Even after her negative experience, Dittmer was quick to compliment Rate My Professor. “I do think it’s valuable,” she said. ”There is a lot of research that shows the positive impacts of consistent anonymous student evaluations and the way they can highlight patterns for professors to assess.” 

Dittmer not only checks Rate My Professor consistently, but also has students fill out surveys twice in her courses: at the beginning of the course, so she can address if anyone is struggling or feeling bothered by something, and also at the end. 

Another top-rated professor at Cuesta on the site, is Mathematics Professor Jen Moreno-Sanders who doesn’t discourage student use of Rate My Professor, “I encourage students to first, talk to their class neighbors and friends, but, also, when looking at the site, seeing, was it three people that got really mad, or was it 30 people that got really mad? Because the patterns really inform,” she said.

Moreno-Sanders said she, too, was inspired to get more consistent feedback by creating her own surveys at the end of all of her courses that ask things like, “how’s this class going for you? What would you suggest changing?” 

“I am always trying to improve my courses,” she said.

“I haven’t looked at mine in forever, and it’s not because I don’t value student opinion, but it is literally a Yelp for teachers,” Moreno-Sanders said. “The people that go on there really love the teacher or really hate the teacher. Very few people go on Rate My Professor to say the teacher was okay.” 

This point by Professor Sanders-Moreno was shared in different words by each professor interviewed.

They agreed that yes, Rate My Professor is an extremely helpful tool to students, all of them further encouraging its use for this reason.

But, they all also noted that it’s not fully reliable data in the way that the majority of students who take their courses, those who fall in the middle zones of neither loving or hating the course, will ever write a review, leaving the site to be mostly dominated by the extremes. 

For students who continue using Rate My Professor, writing more reviews, even for those classes that you don’t have an extreme opinion on, may not only be helpful in creating a more thorough image of a course and professor for future students, but also in humanizing the professors themselves.

In showing that, like students, they too keep growing and evolving.