The ability to read product ratings from other consumers is one of my favorite aspects of shopping online. The site has had its fair share of controversy and most professors choose to ignore it without looking themselves up to see what students have to say, but RateMyProfessors also gives people the opportunity to rate the looks of their instructors. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured a rather entertaining article on the topic entitled Professors: Hot at their Own Risk. He was recently featured on Lemondrop. He told the Chronicle that he pretended he had never seen the list when a colleague brought it to his attention. Research shows that attractive people tend to do better in life, and a paper written by Todd C.
Hot for Teacher: Students Rate Professors on Their Looks
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Not all teachers are equal for a given class. To help with selection, the Internet offers some tools that separate the good, the bad and the ugly. Web sites like Myspace. Review sites let users select from many schools and have databases of teachers listed alphabetically by last name or department. New names and reviews can be added easily so the system stays up-to-date. On Myspace, the teachers are graded A through F on fairness, lectures, tests, homework, grading and accessibility. The grades are averaged and an overall grade is assigned. Grading a teacher is easy; just select a grade for each attribute, write what class you had and enter some notes. Ratemyprofessors organizes the site differently.
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The MTV-owned website, which has been around since , allows college students to publicly rate their professors on a number of traits, including quality and difficulty, as well as a number of descriptors such as "amazing lectures" and "beware of pop quizzes. Additionally, students can rate the professor on their "hotness," as indicated by a red chili pepper icon. The pepper has been a long-standing feature of the site, and Rate My Professors even published lists of the "hottest professors" across the country every academic year between and Dear ratemyprofessor Life is hard enough for female professors. Your 'chili pepper' rating of our 'hotness' is obnoxious and utterly irrelevant to our teaching. Please remove it because TimesUP and you need to do better.
Since , RateMyProfessors. For some, that information might've helped them decide which classes to take, and for others it didn't really matter. I mean, calculus is calculus! However, it did understandably affect some professors, who recently called out the site over the category, which was so originally marked with chili pepper clipart, and the sexism it seemed to embolden.
