RateMyProfessors.com
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Type of site
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Review Site |
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| Available in | English |
| Owner | Viacom |
| Created by | RateMyProfessors.com, LLC. |
| Website | www |
| Users | About 800,000 visitors/month |
| Launched | May 1999 |
RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is a review site, founded in May 1999 by John Swapceinski, a software engineer from Menlo Park, California, which allows college and university students to assign ratings to professors and campuses of American, Canadian, and United Kingdom institutions. The site was originally launched as TeacherRatings.com and converted to RateMyProfessors in 2001. RateMyProfessors.com was acquired in 2005 by Patrick Nagle and William DeSantis. Nagle and DeSantis later resold RateMyProfessors.com in 2007 to Viacom's mtvU, MTV’s College channel.
RateMyProfessors.com is the largest online destination for professor ratings. The site has 8,000+ schools, 1.4 million professors and over 15 million ratings.
Users who have or are currently taking a particular professor’s course may post a rating and review of any professor already listed on the site. Furthermore, users may create a listing for any individual not already listed. To be posted, a rater must rate the course and/or professor on a 1-5 scale in the following categories: "easiness", "helpfulness", "clarity", the rater's "interest" in the class prior to taking it, and the degree of "textbook use" in the course. The rater may also share what grade they received in the course, rate the professor on their "hotness," and include comments of up to max 350 characters in length.
According to the website’s Help page, "The Overall Quality rating [that the professor ends up with] is the average of a teacher's Helpfulness and Clarity ratings...." It’s the professor’s Overall Quality rating that determines whether his/her name, on the list of professors, is accompanied by a little smiley face (meaning "Good Quality"), a frowny face ("Poor Quality"), or an in-between, expressionless face ("Average Quality"). A professor's name is accompanied by a chili pepper icon if the sum of his or her "hot" ratings is greater than zero (one "hot" rating equals +1, one "not hot" or left blank equals −1). In the past, if a professor received a greater amount of "hot" ratings than one, flames would appear on the chili and get larger with every additional "hot" rating. This system seems to have been abolished as none of the peppers are engulfed in flames.
Each year, RateMyProfessors.com compiles Top Lists of the Highest Rated Professors, Hottest Professors, and Top Schools in the U.S. based on ratings and comments from students.
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