Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Rate My Professors: A Glimpse of the Wrath of Undergraduates

Today, I decided to check out the infamous "Rate My Professors" website (cue impending doom music). Wow! I mean, wow! It's hard to take the reviews seriously. Especially when there are one or two well-written positive reviews followed by a slew of poorly-written, angry, negative reviews (the ones where you can see the spittle and bloodshot eyes). And "hot or not?" C'mon! How old are we? Oh yeah, that's right...18.

I've decided to post some of my favorite snippets, taken from the ratings of my soon-to-be chemistry teacher and from my current chemistry teacher.
  • To have this class either maintain or improve your average, you're going to have to be either really smart, or have 12 credits and no extra curricular activities. Between class, labs, night tests, reviews, homework, WebCT, and studying, you have no life.

Isn't that what college is? Class, labs, tests, reviews, homework and studying? I work full-time and I still manage to do all of those things. But I've only got 7 credits. And I'm smart. And I have no life.*

  • Many good students dreams of going to an American Medical School have been washed down the drain thanks to this professor. His intent on all exams was to trick you. ANd most of all material covered on the final will be something you've never seen before. If you want to go to grad/med school AVOID hthis guy. There is another.

I'm pretty sure that if you can't pass Introductory Chemistry, no matter how evil the professor, you can't get into graduate or medical school. Just a guess.

  • Professor BlahBlah is a horrible teacher. He is too lazy to write on the board. He would rather give you a fill in the blank handout so all he has to do is write in the blanks on the overhead.

Professor BlahBlah has to teach 200 students a HUGE amount of information. He has thirty hours to teach thousands of pages of difficult material. If he wrote on the board, we'd cover 1/4 of the material we need. I think skeleton notes are forgivable.

  • Did not like this professor. Class average was a 59. He would not do any practice problems for us ahead of the test. If you enoy learning how to solve chemistry problems on your own, then take him.

There are supplemental instruction sessions three times a week. They consist entirely of practice problems. He also gives out the previous year's test and a review sheet, both with and without answers.

Yikes! I hope by the time I'm teaching (fingers crossed, fingers crossed, fingers crossed) they will have figured out a way to screen the raters. Or, that they'll have figured out a way to get accurate student evaluations.

*I actually do have a life...I just don't have time to relax. But I love my life. Really. It's amazingly full and interesting.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh man Rate My Professor is about 3$ usefulness, and 97% crap. That being said, not all professors are, you know, good. I had one (in chemistry, oddly enough) who used an unfinished, unpublished textbook for the first part of the class, and when we ran out of chapters he told us to look up the material on wikipedia. My dad at the time was chair of Chemical Engineering at another university, so I called him up and asked him what he would say if he heard one of the professors in his department saying that to a class. He said, "I'd be pissed off!" I was pissed off too, you can believe.

But I fully deserved the C I got in that class. I didn't understand any of it!

Anonymous said...

Oops...that dollar sign is supposed to be a percent sign.

Sneezy said...

Self-reporting is inherently a flawed design for collecting data. When the participant has a motive to be biased even a innocuous one, they will display it. I've never understood the use of student evaluations of faculty members even as a university student.