ASHLEY SARALI
reporter
collegian.editor@tccd.edu

The website Rate My Professors is a tool many college students use before registering for classes. 

It helps students choose professors that have been rated good, average or poor by other students who have taken them. According to the website, its mission is to provide a safe place for students to share classroom experiences to help fellow students choose their professors. 

“I do look at Rate My Professors before I choose my classes,” TR student Katherine Westfall said. “I am not the easiest student, so I do need to know beforehand if I will get along with the teacher, and if they will get along with me. I’ve had bad experiences with teachers who were not understanding of my struggles in the past, and I’m always careful about who I choose.”

Rate My Professors, which has been around since 1999, has four main categories: overall rating, level of difficulty, “would take again” and textbook use. 

“I use Rate My Professors because, not only does it give me a rating on if the professor is good or bad, but it also tells me if I am going to need a textbook or not, and that helps me plan which books I need to buy,” Connect student Caleb Robb said.

TR adjunct instructor of geology Lisa Moran said she used the website when she was a college student at the University of Texas at Arlington 10 years ago.

“My first thoughts were that it might be pretty sketchy because relying upon ‘reviews’ seems to skew toward the negative,” Moran said. “But the professors were accurately described in the classes where I used the site to help determine my schedule.”

Moran has a high rating of 4.6 out of 5 on the site. She explained she would use her reviews to better her teaching if needed. 

“If I received consistently bad reviews for specific actions, I’d reassess my actions and see if I needed to change my teaching style to give the students a better chance to be successful in my class,” she said. “I would likely not change things up if a review said I was ‘too hard,’ but if the reviews said I did not answer emails fast enough, I would work on faster responses.”