With scheduling for spring semester only a few weeks away, many Boston University students are scrambling to find, by their own standards, the best classes with the best professors.

While some rely on friends and word of mouth to choose their schedule, some have turned to the Internet for help. Ratemyprofessor.com, a website devoted to ranking college professors, may ease the process of choosing classes for BU students next semester.

Created in 1999, the site was developed by John Swapceinski, a San Jose State University student who had a bad experience with a professor.

“I had a particularly dastardly professor who none of my friends had warned me about,” Swapceinski said.

Swapceinski said the site grew from his need to find an outside source that could give him more details about the professors he might have for upcoming classes.

Ratemyprofessors.com was his solution to that problem. Since its conception in 1999, the site has seen a steady growth in its following. According to Swapceinski, the site receives more than 100,000 visitors each month and contains a quarter-million ratings for 60,000 professors in 1,800 different schools. BU has 70 professors ranked on the site.

The site provides the instructor’s name and course numbers they teach, so the comments accurately reflect an individual class.

Students who visit the site can rate their professors on a scale from one, being the worst ranking to five, being the best. A student can also rate their professor based on easiness, clarity, helpfulness and even sexiness. From that, an average is taken, and the professor receives either a good, average, or poor quality rating.

For BU, 24 of the professors ranked received poor rating, and only seven were rated as “sexy.”

While BU currently has a small number of professors ranked on the site, many other schools, like San Diego State University, Seton Hall University, and Marist College have hundreds of professors ranked.

Claion Chang, a Marist College junior, said he uses the site every time he makes his schedule.

“I look at the classes I have to take, and who is teaching them,” Chang said. “It’s the deciding factor on who I take. It has a good range of information on who is good to take and who is not good to take.”

Virginia Brissette, a College of Communication academic counselor, said she believes this could be used the way Chang uses it, but notes that there are some drawbacks to setting a schedule based solely on student opinions.

“Students may have things to say about a professor based on a negative experience,” Brissette said. “It may be a little misleading in terms of that specific professor.”

Brissette also said since few BU students have actually been to the site to rate their professors, the numbers may not truly reflect the opinion of the majority.

“The larger the number of people you have commenting, the more accurate review you can get,” she said. “The numbers would be less skewed.”

On the other hand, Brissette said she thought the site could be helpful in determining the workload and determining if a class will be too much for a student, though ultimately the decision should be the student’s choice.