Your Professor Is Not That Bad

By Sophia Ong

There’s an important distinction between reputation and reality.

Photo By Diya Kapoor

My first semester of college, I had a professor with 75 “Awful” reviews on Rate My Professor. I’d gotten a late acceptance and lost the class selection war, stuck with the few classes that still had open seats. But the lectures were interesting, the exams were intuitive, and the professor was incredibly passionate and engaged. Maybe I got lucky, but everyone I knew who attended the lecture ended with an “A” in the class. Even a friend of mine who went to (generously) three or four lectures during the semester was able to get a B+. But, of course, a final grade isn’t exactly diagnostic of the professor’s abilities. 

When I returned to the Rate My Professor 1–star ratings, they seemed to be concentrated around complaints like “lectures weren’t recorded” or “tested on too specific things from the lecture.” 

I would think: “Then, go to the lecture?”

Other complaints were inflammatory rants that lacked any specifics. My favorite being: “Made me question if genuine humanity and kindness still exist.” 

I’ll admit - I use Rate My Professor when schedule-building. But I’ve noticed increasingly that a particular thought pattern has emerged from these reviews: Good professor = easy A. Bad professor = requires putting a lot of time and effort into the class. 

There’s also a clear skew for the extremes. The only time I’ve considered leaving a rating on Rate My Professor was when I had a professor I became really frustrated with. In retrospect, it had to do with harsh grading policies. I realized then that Rate My Professor is a decent metric for students who want to fly through easy classes, but it’s not a good measurement for the actual quality of education.

A final point: professors are not public figures. They become professors because they presumably want to share their expertise with students, not to be publicly evaluated and criticized. I often think that if I became a professor, I wouldn’t survive all the inevitable negative reviews that even likeable, tenured professors receive. 

Criticism can be helpful, of course, but let’s practice what we learned in fifth grade. 

Constructive criticism and rating purely for the purpose of sharing objective information is helpful both for prospective students and the professors themselves. Is attendance recorded? Is there a final? What prerequisite knowledge is required? All that can be shared in a way that doesn’t commodify the professor, without saying, “I never wore my seatbelt while driving to school because I wanted to die before making it to his class.”