OSU faculty ranks high overall on RateMyProfessor.com

Website which ranks professors based on anonymous comments by students lists OSU as 44th in its top 50

By: Gail Cole

Posted: 11/18/08

A popular website that allows students to access information about future professors and vent frustrations about current classroom situations has given OSU high marks.

A recent ranking of national universities by RateMyProfessor.com listed OSU as number 44 in the top 50 in the nation, based on the faculty ratings by the website's users.

RateMyProfessor.com is an online forum where students can anonymously voice their opinions about professors. Over 6,000 schools are found on the website.

Students can rate professors on a number of things, including difficulty, helpfulness, clarity and textbook use. These ratings are grouped into "good," "average," and "poor" quality per user.

According to RateMyProfessor.com, schools had to have at least 30 rated professors to be considered for this list, and the ratings were averaged and ranked based on these averages.

Though OSU made it into the top 50 schools, no single OSU faculty member is found on the list of the 50 highest rated professors.

The top five universities on this list are Brigham Young University, Southeastern Louisiana University, Christopher Newport University, Stephen F. Austin State University and University of Houston.

The top five national universities on U.S. News' most recent list found on usnews.com are Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, and these were not found on RateMyProfessor.com's list.

Though this list is informal, many schools require faculty to be periodically reviewed in order to enhance teaching.

At OSU, faculty are subject to regular review where student evaluations are taken into consideration.

"There's a mandate … to use the student evaluation of teaching results," said Becky Johnson, vice provost of Academic Affairs. "Those have to be there for all classes [to be] taught by a faculty member."

Faculty who have difficulty teaching have several resources to help improve, according to Johnson, including the Center for Teaching and Learning.

"Even if a faculty member struggles at the beginning … there's ways for them to improve and still get through the tenure process," Johnson said.

Even when students fill out formal evaluations for classes, found as mandatory bubble sheets and supplementary written evaluations for each department, RateMyProfessor.com is still used by many students at OSU.

However, not all see it as the perfect tool for evaluating professors.

Giang Dang, a graduate student in business, said she has used RateMyProfessor.com several times before taking a class but knows it is difficult to judge a professor based on a few anonymous ratings.

For example, Dang said that after reviewing the negative rating of a professor on the site, she ended up enjoying the class.

"Everybody has a negative and positive side," Dang said.

Cassondra Pittman, a pre-dental junior in microbiology, uses the website "every time I sign up for a class," but believes a professor won't always get fair ratings since she thinks many students who are upset with a professor are most likely to respond on the site.

"Sometimes you can't take it too seriously," Pittman said.

In addition to RateMyProfessor.com, Pittman also uses the Grade My Professor feature on MySpace.

Though RateMyProfessor.com is a useful tool, there are formal ways for students to voice praise or concern about their OSU professors.

In order for specific input to be considered during the faculty review process, a student must turn in a signed letter to the professor's department head to be put in a professor's file for use in future reviews.

"If a student's willing to sign it, good or bad, they can do it and ask for it to be put in the faculty's personnel file," Johnson said.

Gail Cole, senior reporter

news@dailybarometer.com, 737-2231