RateMyProfessor.com: is it voluntary?

[Grunty DaGnome]

I was looking up a particularly terrible professor I've had in the past on ratemyprofessor.com wondering what others have made of him and I got a message saying "removed from the system."

Is this how ratemyprofessor.com typically works? So if you find a professor who has been removed from ratemyprofessor at other schools, should you be warry that they will be a waste of your time and huge amounts of hard earned money?

[Pitangus]

I don't think professors' listings get removed because their ratings are terrible, if that is your concern. I've never seen a removed listing, but I would imagine it would only happen if the professor changed schools and someone notified the site, or someone fought really hard to get the listing removed (most professors dislike RMP, but only a few care enough to try to get their listings removed, usually without sucess though). So I don't know what a removed listing would really say about a professor, if it says anything.

I don't put too much stock in RMP though: it mostly just attracts the whiners, and professors themselves have admitted to writing bogus entries on their own and other listings out of disdain for the site.

Yes, you can sometimes sense a trend if a professor has several pages of comments that say the same thing, but with negative ratings it's often the same dumb complaint.

I've never made any decisions based on the ratings. If anything, I check after the fact to see if my experience matched the comments. Often it didn't.

Edited March 6, 2012 by Pitangus

[CarlieE]

I agree with the above post.. I generally have only use RMP.com to see what sort of whining comes out of the class - in fact, if I see a lot of comments like "The paper he assigned was Sooooo Hard! I hate him" then I generally take the class Using RMP involves a lot of reading between the lines...

I would recommend trying to find out about a professor through other professors in his/her field, not in an outright way, but tactfully...

[Eigen]

Using RMP to look up prospective professors for grad school is even worse than using it for undergrad.. It's a site where the bottom really seems to rise, and reveres very little useful info there.

RMP is pretty good about removing profiles at a the professors request, usually due to some stalker ish/unfactual posts on them.

[ANDS!]

I've yet to find any graduate instructors (at least in my field) on there, most likely because they don't teach undergraduate courses.

I have however used it for undergrad courses, and if you know how to use RMP, it can be helpful in sussing out an instructors teaching style and "quirks". Obviously any posts that say "OMG doesNT know wut their talking about, cant teach!" is taken with a grain of salt.

[robot_hamster]

It can be a fun website if you're just looking out of curiosity. I wouldn't take anything that is said on there too seriously though, especially when it is just someone who is whining. It is funny though sometimes. I have looked up old professors just to see what people say. Sometimes I can see why they would say what they did because I might know the professor well enough to know about their "quirks". I just have to laugh because sometimes it is so true. It certainly isn't what I would consider a valuable tool though. You can't judge how your relationship will be with a professor you haven't met yet simply by looking at what other people say about them. Every person is different. People are going a like a professor and people are going to hate a professor. That doesn't have anything to do with how I will feel about that professor.

As far as a professor's name disappearing from the site, I don't think it means anything. I think the others are right, their disappearance could be due to a lot of reasons and is not necessarily a bad sign.

Edited March 6, 2012 by robot_hamster

[TheFez]

I think RMP attracts two kinds of students: those who love a professor, and those who hate them. I do however think that many posts are specific enough in their praise/criticism to be useful. If there is a high number of ratings (>12 or so) I think the validity goes up pretty well.

[TakeruK]

I think if you want to know how good a prof is for teaching classes, a good way to find out is to ask the current grad students in the program! I don't think RMP measures other things like research supervision etc.