When course selection comes around, Rate My Professors is a blessing for undecided students. But among the faculty the site ranks, things get complicated
By Hailey Ford and Edward Lander
The sound of a pen scratching against paper ceases. A chair is pushed back from an uncomfortable desk and a completed exam booklet, ever so slightly stained with tears, is handed over. A student walks out of the classroom, drops to the floor and pulls out their phone.
“The worst professor I’ve ever had,” the student types into a message box on ratemyprofessors.com. “Prepare yourself to get absolutely destroyed and regret every choice you’ve ever made, AVOID AT ALL COSTS.”
This isn’t a direct quote, though it may as well be. There are currently 3,453 professors listed for Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) on Rate My Professors, a public site where students have the opportunity to leave ratings and comments on their professors. Some have as few as two or three reviews, others accumulating hundreds. Many comments are negative, degrading or downright mean.
If you don’t use Rate My Professors, you surely know someone who does. The site is often the first result that comes up when searching for a professor’s name, meaning it’s hard for students to resist taking a peek.
Rate My Professors is part of the structure of modern student life. It serves as both an outlet for rage from students who feel they’ve been wronged by profs and a blue book of faculty to cross-reference when selecting courses each semester.
Created in 1999 by software engineer John Swapceinski—the site was an instant success. It became so popular that in 2007 it was sold to Viacom’s MTVU, a division of the television network MTV that broadcasted closed-circuit to college campuses. By the time it was sold again in 2018 to American media company Cheddar, it had amassed 20 million ratings across the 1.8 million professors listed across North America and the United Kingdom.
While the site has grown, its model has mostly stayed the same—including the absence of any protections to verify that a student has actually taken a class, or to prevent them from spamming reviews. It protects students’ anonymity but does not demand credible reviews.
“To be honest, I haven’t looked at Rate My Professors in about 15 years,” says Sean Springer, a sessional lecturer for TMU’s G. Raymond Chang School for Continuing Education. Springer is a common recipient of glowing reviews—his rating currently sits at 4.8 out of five stars with 69 ratings—making him one of TMU’s highest rated professors.
Springer was in his master’s at TMU when the site was in its infancy. It was here—on the other end of the equation—that he discovered just how influential the site was and would become.
“When Rate My Professors first launched, there was a professor who I studied under at TMU who just got roasted, he got destroyed by it,” Springer says. “I thought that was pretty unfair because he changed my life for the better.”
“It’s unfortunate if a professor is being defamed and they can’t really do anything about it,” continues Springer. “I like that it’s a place where people can talk and share experiences. But…this may not be a completely accurate representation of the person’s performance.”
Despite his almost entirely positive feedback, Springer avoids poring over his Rate My Professors page when possible. His mother-in-law once posted his rating on Facebook, hoping to impress friends and family. Springer, embarrassed, promptly asked her to take it down. “I was like, ‘Sandy, don’t do that. This is uncomfortable for me.’”
Springer doesn’t feel his reviews, good or bad, are fully reflective of him and his work. “When I was a lot younger and a lot more self conscious, I did rely on [Rate My Professors] a fair bit,” he admits. “After a while, I found it began to kind of reinforce my self-consciousness. And so I felt like I was checking it too much.”
Dwight Alexander’s online lectures look more like Twitch streams than Zoom calls. As a part-time contract professor in the RTA School of Media, he treats his classes as part of the subject matter they often surround: television—they’re complete with subtitles, an intro, multiple cameras and even credits at the end.
“I’m competing with phones, laptops, Netflix, Prime Video—they’re all a click away. So you have to be as engaging and entertaining and educational as possible if you want to be able to keep working with your students,” Alexander says.
Alexander’s Rate My Professors page doesn’t have a drop of red. With a perfect five out of five, 100 per cent of his 53 reviewers say they’d take his class again.
Despite teaching for around five years, Alexander didn’t know Rate My Professors existed until three years ago when an excited student told him that they switched into his class due to his positive reviews.
“I don’t look at [Rate My Professors] that often,” says Alexander. “Until someone brings it up, maybe once a semester.”
When he was first introduced to the site by a group of students, they also pulled up pages for other professors so that he could read their reviews. “Of course, it’s colour coded, so it goes from green to red. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s kind of aggressive.’”
Alexander sees the risks but sympathizes with users. “You have no influence on it. It can be daunting, but at the same time, humbling,” he says.
“I think for the students, [Rate My Professors is] an amazing thing, there’s the level of access to technology. The ability to actually do and connect is so vast,” he adds.
“It can be daunting, but at the same time, humbling”
While five star reviews like Alexander’s are common, and one-star reviews are plentiful, the neutral threes and fours often tend to get lost in the mix. The review breakdowns of professors with middling ratings resemble a reverse bell curve as most students are only leaving reviews when they have strong views—one way or the other.
“I would say I reserve [ratings] for when I either have an overwhelmingly positive experience with a professor, or if it’s overwhelmingly negative,” says Damian Gavrusenko, a second-year electrical engineering student. Gavrusenko left one of his rare reviews to Majed Alqasas, a mathematics professor—and one of the highest-rated instructors at TMU.
“The people in [Alqasas’] classes did significantly better on examinations than with other professors,” Gavrusenko says. “He ensures that the people in his class actually understand.”
A high Rate My Professors score isn’t the only praise Alqasas has received. In 2018, he was featured in The Eyeopener’s “Person(able) Profs” series, where he and his popularity were the full focus. In 2015, he received the Professor Who Made a Mark award from the university, and in 2016 nabbed the Dean’s Teaching Award.
Outside his small office on the seventh floor of the Victoria Building, students line the narrow hall waiting to attend his office hours, a time when he’s happy to carefully go over coursework and break down tough concepts.
Unlike many professors, Alqasas takes his reviews into careful consideration.
“I take any evaluation seriously because I have to do my best,” he says. “I need to know where my shortcomings are.”
For him, this means regularly looking through his reviews, and supplementing them with the results of the Course Operations Survey, a university-administered service that allows students to share thoughts on a prof’s performance at the end of each semester.
Occasionally, Alqasas even looks at his colleagues’ reviews, but he doesn’t make a habit of it, only taking a peek when he’ll be working closely with another instructor and needs to see how their teaching styles will align.
“I think it reflects a true thing about the professor,” Alqasas says. “If I want to know exactly how he is teaching, I would go and look there, because I can’t see the online evaluation, but I can see it on Rate My Professors.”
While proud of his reviews, he says this doesn’t mean each one is fair or justified. Only a handful of his astounding 182 reviews are negative, but they are there. One of these, he says, comes from an upset student who didn’t follow his rules surrounding “cheat sheets.” Alqasas allows this kind of exam aid, but with one caveat: “No examples,” which this student included, and was reprimanded for.
“Because he did something wrong, we took it away. So he wrote that it’s one out of five,” Alqasas says. “Is this really fair?”
Students leave reviews like these for all kinds of reasons. Third-year RTA media production student James Bottomley says, “It can be kind of reactionary, like people experience one bad thing in class and then flood in with negative reviews.”
Like Alqasas, professor emeritus Garnet Ord also taught in the department of mathematics. On Rate My Professors, he has 113 reviews—more than most profs at TMU—but almost all of them are negative.
“I ceased checking ‘Rate My Professors’ with the [COVID-19] pandemic where I faced very aggressive resistance against efforts to reduce exam cheating,” he wrote in an email to The Eye.
For Ord, this experience showed him a part of student life he hadn’t seen before: cyberbullying, ultimately changing his relationship with his students for good. It even influenced his decision to retire.
“I could not ‘see’ a resolution of these problems, particularly in the ‘service teaching’ aspect of math courses,” he writes.
Ord isn’t alone. His comments align with much of the criticism that Rate My Professors receives from students and faculty alike.
Studies from the Public Library of Science, Northeastern University and Texas State University—among many others—have shown that the site has a negative bias towards female professors. Men were more likely to be labeled terms like “genius” or “brilliant,” than women on the site.
This is something that can be seen even on TMU’s Rate My Professors pages, where around three quarters of the professors with a rating of under two stars are women. In contrast, the highest rated professors, although altogether less common, have a slight bias towards men.
While arguably still a useful tool—home to praise, fair comment and helpful advice—Rate My Professors can also be a means of harassment or an opportunity to anonymously express their feedback, bad or good. For the first two decades of its existence, students could leave a “chili pepper” marker to indicate the perceived physical attractiveness or ‘hotness’ of a prof. The site chose to take down this metric after receiving criticism from both male and female professors who condemned it for being objectifying and outright demeaning.
Some say the site is a lost cause and ignore it altogether—like Ted Rogers School of Management professor Ojelanki Ngwenyama, one of TMU’s lowest-rated professors. Ngwenyama declined an interview with The Eye, but said in an emailed statement that, “Serious students generally don’t spend time posting their opinions on that platform.”
Others say an alternative is what’s needed—something that works around Rate My Professors’ fatal flaws. Springer is of this belief.
“It’s their conversation, not mine,” he says. “But if there was a public process where the professor was invited to talk about their methods and to explain what they did, I think that that would be wholly beneficial.”
The closest thing to an alternative—aside from other online chat forums like Reddit—is the university-administered Course Operations Survey (COS), which allows students to leave thoughts on a course towards the end of each semester. Though there’s a big difference between the COS and Rate My Professors: the results aren’t public for the former.
According to Ilona Demetriadis, a research analyst with the Office of the Vice-Provost, Students and an administrator of the COS, the survey provides a “necessary rigour around student feedback,” that Rate My Professors lacks.
“Rate My Professors can be completed by anyone, regardless of whether they were in a professor’s class or not. There is nothing in place to stop a disgruntled neighbour, relative, ex-partner, peer, former student, et cetera from completing one or more negative reviews,” says Demetriadis.
On the other hand, the COS must be completed by registered students.
It’s not hard to understand why a prof might trust the COS more than Rate My Professors, but in Alqasas’ opinion, they’re not all that different—especially considering how similar the feedback he receives between the two platforms typically is.
“There is a fact in Rate My Professors,” he says. “Especially when I compare the online evaluations with what they say there—it’s pretty much close.”
However, Demetriadis still encourages students to leave their thoughts on professors through the COS for one main reason—although students don’t have access, the professor will see it.
“The university will receive and review their feedback through COS, whereas the university…does not review posts made on Rate My Professors,” she says.
Still, the fact remains that students want insight on their professors—and if no student-facing alternative exists—why not check out Rate My Professors?
“[Rate my Professors] can help me decide if I want to suffer through the 12 weeks, or if it’s gonna be a fun time,” Bottomley says.
Springer says he understands why students might have the impulse to check the site.
“These students are spending a lot of money on these courses. They want assurance going into the course that it’s going to be worth their time,” he says. “I think one of the worst things you can ever hear as the professor is that a course was a waste of time.”
Within the pages of Rate My Professors, there’s little room for nuance. It’s all red and green, with very little in between. After all, students picking professors are looking for a yes or a no, a stern warning or a breath of relief.
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