The Student Review Site That Became Course Registration’s Shadow Curriculum
Rate My Professors transformed course selection from academic catalog guesswork into crowdsourced intelligence gathering, with 19+ million ratings across 8,000 schools guiding students toward “easy A” instructors and away from notorious difficulty/unfairness. Founded 1999 but reaching peak influence 2010s with smartphone ubiquity, RMP became unofficial quality control system for higher education—students checking ratings before every registration, professors obsessing over scores, and universities ignoring feedback despite students’ reliance.
The site’s metrics—Overall Quality (1-5), Level of Difficulty, and “Would Take Again” percentage—reduced complex teaching to crude quantification, with comment sections revealing professor personalities: “Lecture is boring but fair grader, just show up,” “AVOID unless you love 3-hour exams,” “Changed my major because of this class (in a good way).” The infamous “hot chili pepper” icon (removed 2018 after #MeToo reckoning) indicated physical attractiveness, revealing rating system’s gendered bias (attractive female professors rated easier, unattractive women harsher).
Students developed RMP literacy: discount extreme reviews (1s and 5s), weight recent reviews (professors change), recognize entitled complainers (“gave me B when I deserved A”), distinguish hard-but-fair from incompetent. Registration became strategic optimization—gaming schedules around high-rated professors despite less convenient times, avoiding required courses until “good professor” taught them, perpetuating popularity contest where challenging instructors got punished.
The platform’s dark side emerged in research: women and minority professors received harsher, more personal criticism; students conflated entertainment with effectiveness; easy graders outscored rigorous teachers; and negative reviews’ psychological toll on instructors (checking obsessively, depression from harsh criticism). Some professors gamed the system (assigning students to leave reviews), others ignored it entirely, while universities claimed to value teaching but promoted based on research.
The 2020 pandemic made RMP crucial as students hunted compassionate professors for remote learning, with ratings reflecting COVID-era teaching adaptations. By 2023, RMP faced competition from subreddit professor discussions and GroupMe inside knowledge, while criticized for reducing teaching quality to popularity metric. Yet the site persisted because institutions failed to provide transparent teaching quality data, leaving students to crowdsource intelligence about which professors genuinely cared vs. which mailed it in—democracy’s messy answer to higher education’s accountability gap.
Primary platforms: RateMyProfessors.com, mobile apps, Reddit (professor discussion threads)
Sources: RMP site statistics, Inside Higher Ed analysis of rating biases, gender bias research (2014-2018), student registration behavior studies