There is probably not a professor in the United States who does not know of the clickbait site known as Rate My Professors. This site and others like it are destroying the student relationship, contributing to a culture of cowardice, and facilitating sexism.
Rate My Professors is sexist and wildly inaccurate. We are a group of professors and concerned parents of students who have decided enough is enough. We have covered the inaccuracies and sexism that is rampant on Rate My Professors in other posts. In this post we are speaking directly to professors, alerting you to the danger represented by Rate My Professors, and giving you the tools to fight back.
Professors Are Not Businesses
The argument has been put forth that rating a professor is no different than rating a business on Yelp or Facebook. This is demonstrably false. A business is a public endeavor. A business has obligations to serve anyone who can pay, and more to the point, actively attempts to serve anyone that can pay. A professor has no such similarity or obligation. A professor is correctly and ethically placed behind constraints through which a student must earn the right to the professor’s services. A professor is under no obligation to serve students as customers, and in fact that concept is completely contrary to the mission of a professor. Higher education is not simply a matter of “the customer is always right.” The student-teacher relationship is far more complex and the professor is in no way a business simply seeking to sell another product.
Rate My Professors seeks to diminish professors so as to be rated like a fast food chain or a delivery service, and to be discarded just as easily.
Assault on Privacy
Rate My Professors is an extreme assault on the personal privacy of private citizens. Professors are not businesses, nor are they public figures. Professors are not public servants and should not be subject to public “rating.” Professors are frequently paid with public funds, but they are not public servants. A police officer is a public servant who has a duty 24/7 to uphold the law. A firefighter is a public servant and can be called to service 24/7. A city construction worker, who also draws pay from the same public funds as a police officer, is NOT a public servant. The distinction is duty. A police officer has a duty to “serve and protect” the public. Neither the city construction worker nor the professor have such a duty. At no time does a professor have an obligation to serve the public at large. To avail yourself of a professor’s knowledge you have to apply, be accepted, and enroll into a college. As such, a professor is simply a private citizen doing his or her job.
Rating a professor publicly, especially in the anonymous and cowardly way that is done on Rate My Professors is an invasion of privacy designed for one and only one reason, profit.
Rate My Professors Seeks to Legitimize Themselves Within the Academic Process
Rate My Professors is in no way a legitimate part of the academic process, but they are actively pursuing that standing and they are succeeding. Rate My Professors in no way represents the rigors and standards of higher education. They allow and promote unchecked claims. They allow anonymous, cowardly ratings. They allow humiliation and sexism to run unchecked. For 17 years they had a “hotness” rating frequently used to humiliate and insult professors, especially female professors. Yet in the face of all that, they are pushing hard to be a legitimate part of the academic process. They want to be an integral part of Forbes list of best colleges (and they were for a while). They want to colleges and professors to partner with them for ratings. There could be nothing more cancerous and destructive to the academic process than the kind of profiteering Rate My Professors promotes.
You say, “Who Cares, They Don’t Matter.” Yes, they matter…
- Rate My Professors is impacting enrollment in classes. Professors that are rated poorly are losing students, and vice versa. However, as we have shown, poor ratings are simply easiness ratings, which means students are avoiding “hard” teachers and subjects.
- Rate My Professors is impacting department enrollment. Students are avoiding departments with lower overall ratings. As we have shown, the departments most likely to have lower ratings are STEM fields. Students are avoiding STEM because of this clickbait nonsense.
- Rate My Professors is destroying the student teacher relationship by creating an adversarial relationship. Professors are increasingly becoming jaded and turning away from academics and teaching because of sites like Rate My Professors.
- Rate My Professors is being used for hiring decisions, sometimes in secret, sometimes out in the open, and this is unethical and irresponsible in the extreme. Also likely illegal.
- Rate My Professors supports a culture of cowardice with anonymous ratings while simultaneously requiring professors to out themselves by signing up for an account before they can defend themselves. Anyone can disparage a professor anonymously, but the professor has to stand up and show themselves to defend themselves. A professor is forced to go it alone against a corporation and dozens of misguided students.
- Worst of all, Rate My Professors has been around long enough they are legitimizing themselves simply as a matter of time (21 years). Professors more and more have themselves come up through academics in a time where sites like Rate My Professors are common. In fact, younger professors have probably used the site themselves as students. Rate My Professors is becoming a de-facto standard.
But *My* Rating is Good…
If you are a professor who doesn’t care (or is even proud) because you have a good rating, please consider these points…
- If your rating is “good” then it is highly likely it’s just because you’re easy. Students are really just rating you as the blow-off, easy-A professor. Academic Integrity Group has shown that high quality ratings are strongly negatively correlated to difficulty.
- If you’re okay with Rate My Professors, then you are okay with sexism. Female professors are consistently rated worse than males when compared to true college evaluations. If you condone Rate My Professors then you condone sexism.
- You may be tempted to say, “I make the subject easy because I’m a good teacher.” If it were as simple as that, then STEM fields and female professors would not consistently be rated more poorly than non-STEM and male professors — by up to 38% in some groups! Do you honestly believe that STEM and female professors are just simply worse teachers?
- If you’re okay with Rate My Professors you are okay with humiliation. Do you need a reminder that this site for 17 years had a hotness rating and only took it down in the face of overwhelming criticism (and they resisted taking it down)? Think about that. Even today you can find thousands of unchecked insulting, rude, crude, offensive comments about professors all over the site.
- Your “good” rating is probably just a correlation to the fact you’re easy, male, and/or not in a STEM field. If you’re okay with Rate My Professors then what you are really saying is that you don’t care about your female colleagues, and you don’t care about your STEM colleagues.
Regardless of your own rating, your obligation is to academics and your fellow professors, and to your students who don’t understand the damage they are doing by using sites like Rate My Professors.
What Can You Do?
- Place the Academic Integrity Group logo and link on your website, in your syllabus, and anywhere else you can.
- If any aspect of your college or university uses Rate My Professors to make decisions, report it to the Academic Integrity Group. They will catalog, investigate, and make sure this information makes it to the right legal representation and put a stop to it.
- Do not sign up for an account on Rate My Professors. Do not engage students on the site. We cannot legitimize Rate My Professors in any way.
- Sign up for monitoring and protection of your profile through the Academic Integrity Group. You will receive an alert any time anything changes on your profile.
Visit the Academic Integrity Group and defend yourself. Professors are the top of every field and every discipline. Professors have all the tools they need to stop Rate My Professors except one; solidarity.
Brought to you by Rating Professors.
