Rate My Professors — Do Your Reviews Matter?
My observation:
Course evaluations have now become Amazon reviews — "These shoes are uncomfortable when I wear them on my hands — 1 star"
I did some brief research on the impact of RateMyProfessors.com — a popular website where students review their instructors.
If you're an instructor who did not know about websites like this, did your heart just sink? Or are you eager to go and discover your rating?
Perhaps you think sites like this are trash?
Maybe so. But consider how often you review the product ratings on sites like Amazon and how they have influenced your own purchase decision.
The reality is that such ratings do have an impact.
And if it's not RateMyProfessors.com (with its somewhat dated reviews), it's some other website, social media post, or face-to-face conversation that's happening.
Students will Google you.
Many will believe what they read.
Most will not do rigorous research.
You already know all of this to be true.
The Age of the Personal Brand
We now live in the age of information where everyone has a personal brand. Your personal brand is how others feel about you.
Yup, feel.
We cannot tell others how to feel about us — but we can influence that feeling by contributing to what people see, hear, and read about us.
Whether we like it or not, we all have a personal brand.
We can choose to let others define it for us — or we can make an effort to define it ourselves.
A strong personal brand not only helps us, but it also helps us help others by making it easier to connect people, open doors, raise money for good causes, and more.
Ok, now let's get back to education ...
Prior to conducting my mini-research, here was my advice to instructors:
If websites like RateMyProfessors scare you, there are two options:
- Dumb down your course by reducing attendance and homework requirements. Make it super easy for students to pass. — or —
- Level up your course by adding more experiential learning. Make it engaging, practical, and meaningful.
After My Research ...
My advice has not changed.
You can improve your rating by making things really easy for students.
Or, by making them feel better about the hard work they have to put in to earn their grade.
If you choose the second option, then the question becomes —
How can we make students feel better about working harder?
Here's how:
- Make the content delivery more engaging— more interesting, less reading, more doing.
- Make the experience feel practical— dispel the common question of "Why am I learning this?"
- Make the learning meaningful— build personalized skills that are transferrable to the real world.
From my experience, the easiest way to do all of the above in one shot is to adopt experiential learning.
For the adventurous instructors, this can be a rework of the entire curriculum. Or for an easier transition, it could be adding an enhancement for part of it.
The first step is to start searching for examples of experiential learning (BTW, this article is part of my newsletter and teacher community where I share such examples).
Weaponization of Reviews
Increasingly, students and non-students use reviews as a way to penalize people and companies they don't like. These manipulated reviews are an unfortunate reality that are difficult to address.
My thinking on this is as follows — if you see an unfair review, try to reply to it if you can. The reply should be clear and rational, not aggressive. The reply is not for the original poster, but for everyone else who will be reading the post. Because I think it's more problematic to leave an unfair review unchallenged than it is to provide a measured reply. But caution should be used in any event.
Interesting References
Here is a small collection of some of the more interesting references I stumbled upon when I was researching RateMyProfessors.com. Some of these are a bit old now, but still interesting. This research is not rigorous by any means.
Amusing Reviews Received by One Instructor
My negative reviews include the following:
- "The amount of homework was unreal. I spent on average, 5 hours a week on this homework, which is also graded on correctness."
- "Only take this class if... you like learning on your own."
- "He is a really tough grader and will take off points for little things (i.e. forgetting an equals sign)."
- "He... marks off on tests if he doesn't know how you got an answer."
- "Also, the homework is graded on accuracy not completion..."
- source
Advice by Benjamin Faust
Advice by a Top Writer on Quora
I’ll answer this as somebody that takes teaching (very) seriously, used to have an active RMP page, and somebody as a student that used RMP all the time to [check professors/write reviews] as I didn’t want to waste time with a poor-quality professor (I’ve had my fair share of pretty bad professors, they correlated pretty nicely with RMP reviews). Continue reading on Quora athttps://qr.ae/pymq87
Professors Read Their Reviews — plenty of videos like this one
Research
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I'm Mathew Georghiou and I write about how games are transforming education and learning. I also share my experience as an entrepreneur inventing products and designing educational resources used by millions around the world. More about me at Georghiou.com