Prof rankings re-evaluated

RateMyProfessors.com describes economics department Chairman Kevin Lang as ‘boring’ and ‘not a really good lecturer,’ but also ‘quite attractive, intelligent, and refined in a sexy way.’

‘Sixteen ratings over five and a half years that I’ve been here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how much trust you should put in that.’

As registration for next semester winds down, RateMyProfessor is a resource for BU students to use, but many professors said they think there are inherent errors in the site.

‘My own sense is that rating professors is a good idea, [but] I would much rather have a similar program run by students,’ international relations professor Adil Najam said. ‘How you rate your professor should be slightly different from how you rate a singing dog on YouTube.’

RateMyProfessor, a site launched in 1999 to give students an anonymous online forum to evaluate professors, has 2,173 BU professor rankings. Despite some extreme comments, BU was ranked 45th of 50 in 2007 for highest combined average rating for professors on the site.

The site, however, does not take into consideration the bias of the students who choose to rate their professors, mechanical engineering professor Pierre Dupont said.

‘You might have someone with an axe to grind,’ Dupont said. ‘You have to average all these to get the most accurate sample.’

Though Dupont said he thinks some of the ratings are ‘very entertaining,’ word-of-mouth is the most common means of selecting or deselecting professors.

When MTV, which acquired the site last year, approached professors at various universities about shooting a reaction video to the site’s content last spring, associate psychology professor Catherine Caldwell-Harris’ agreed.

Caldwell-Harris’ rating had comments such as, ‘nut job,’ ‘off her rocker’ and ‘absolutely insane.’

‘The students are generally very harsh,’ she said. ‘I was so horrified about these awful things they said about me.’