Professor Ranking Puts Instructors on the Receiving End of the Grade

Today’s college students need only bring a cup of strong coffee to class to stay awake because they no longer have to worry about ending up with boring or poor professors thanks to a bevy of online professor ranking sites that dominate the collegiate search engines. But do these professor rankings provide reliable information and just how often are they employed by incoming and seasoned students?

A simple Google search of “rank my professor” will bring up pages of available free sites devoted to not only ranking professors by former, or current students, but also provide tools for selecting a college; finding new, used and rentable textbooks; sharing knowledge on courses including reviewing old test materials; and handy tools designed to help students set up a class schedule so they can visualize the who and what of their prospective school week.

These free sites are often made known to students through their own campuses via student media outlets, dining halls, lounges and fitness centers or through social media services like Facebook. Students can log on and review what others have written about professors at more than 2,000 colleges across the nation or by setting up an account in a matter of minutes they too become a ranking professor expert.

Depending upon the site—RateMyProffessors.com, Koofers.com, MyEdu.com, to name a few—students can rank professors on a 1-5 or A-F scale. Professor rankings are subjective, of course, and should be read with that in mind. However, some sites allow professors to respond to their critics with rebuttal videos. Most often, the sites screen the rankings prior to posting to weed out caustic commentary and attempt to post only professor rankings that are helpful, be they good or bad.

While some sites keep a visible numerical count of the number of rankings posted, there is no way to know how many students simply view the sites. Overall statistics seem small in comparison to the number of professors and colleges ranked, however, blogs reveal how prolific these tools are in the current information age. Likely, this is the new way of ranking professors.
 

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