Some Things, You're Better Off Not Knowing … Thoughts on RateMyProfessors.com
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some Things, You're Better Off Not Knowing … Thoughts on RateMyProfessors.com Aimée Morrison University of Waterloo Check the website, tell yourself you're looking for someone else or you're looking as a joke. Find yourself. Experience a moment of heart stopping anxiety as you click the link on your name: "self-obsessed" "great clothes" "boring class" "who gives a f*?" "stupidest waste of time" "stuck-up snob teaching useless crap" "who cares" "don't take this class !!!" There might be positive things written about you—but this isn't going to be what you remember. It's the nasty stuff that sticks. How do you feel? A hole in the pit of your stomach … didn't you not publish anything at all this year because you've been slaving away at the prep for this course? Didn't you assign long-format writing to give students a chance to really stretch … and thus stretch out your marking? Didn't you paste on that smile every day knowing you were walking into a hostile room [End Page 16] of non-majors who would rather just text-message smileys to each other than learn business writing? Why the hell are you doing this anyways? * * * Why don't I come right out and say it: my ranking on RateMyProfessors is awful. Really bad. I've earned one of those little grey faces and an overall ranking (as of today) of 2.4, and a hotness quotient of zero, based on evaluations submitted by twenty-four students, mostly between September 2004 and March 2006. On the rating of professors The site's creators tout RateMyProfessors as a tool of student empowerment, helping undergraduates to better navigate undergraduate course selection (RMP "About us"). But does it actually help anyone to choose their courses? I asked my current students about this in class. When queried directly about RMP, most look vaguely appalled that I know about it or that I might think that they use it to pick courses. After this discussion, in the relative privacy of my office hour, some of my students stop by to tell me with nervous sympathy that my ranking on that site "is pretty bad" and that I probably shouldn't look at it. I'm touched, if a little uncomfortable, with these students' concerns with my self-esteem, but a little self-searching suggests that they were not too far off the mark in reading my response to the site as primarily emotional. I'm surprised to discover that some—most—of my reactions to my rankings are completely personal rather than professional. Such reactions, though, are coded into RMP itself, even as it claims the moral high ground of promoting transparency in education. In nearly the same breath as RMP founder John Swapceinski claims that "millions of students use the site to help plan their class schedules, and improve the quality of their educations," the press release in which he makes this statement describes the student submissions as constituting "a public review (and sometimes a public flogging) of university professors" and promotes the feature that allows students to "see who the hottest professors are at their school, as well as read the top 15 funniest ratings" (RMP "About us"). Ultimately, I find that these reviews—unsystematic, impossible to verify for authenticity, taken not at all seriously by university administrations, and often treated as a joke by students themselves (Westhues, Romanowska)—provoke such anger and anxiety in me because … they hurt my feelings. While on some level, the creators and raters on this site may indeed be attempting to redress the opacity of teacher evaluation and [End Page 17] honestly spotlight truly great or poor teachers, at base RMP is most successful as an entertainment: a place to rant, to fantasize, to pass the time, to let fly the resentment and tension that build in the course of a difficult and challenging education. That...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".