Course selection for the spring semester is upon us. 13,000 Tufts students, not to mention the 15 million university students nationwide, must take out their scales in commencement of the time-honored, stressful search for the perfect classes. If you are like me, you will often have multiple browser tabs open in a painstaking attempt to strategize a balanced semester schedule with courses that are intellectually engaging, complete the greatest amount of requirements possible, and range in difficulty while still allowing you to hit the town on a Friday night.
The end-of-semester course evaluation is a highly effective tool for recording students’ feedback on classes, and Tufts powerfully incentivizes completion by taking hostage of end-of-semester grades, coercing the vast majority of students into completing extensive surveys for each course. Tufts, however, does not provide the valuable results of these evaluations to its own students, instead making them only accessible to the Tufts administration and the instructors themselves. By preventing students from using this data, students are forced to rely on the next best resource: Rate My Professors (RMP).
Though RMP’s feedback questions are less robust than the end-of-semester course evaluations, students will find that this service is more than adequate to use as a substitute. A study conducted by the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 2008 found that RMP’s review content had a high rate of similarity to that of official evaluations conducted by universities. Additionally, RMP reviews are often written by those who feel strongly, whether positively or negatively, toward their professor. Students’ sense of obligation to advise their peers may motivate these sometimes extreme reviews. On the other hand, for Tufts’s course evaluations, students do not feel this same obligation, and have the propensity to half-heartedly complete them, which may lead to skewed or incomplete results. Racing to the end of a course evaluation by clicking 4s and 5s haphazardly may resonate with many of us.
Both the current course evaluation system and RMP operate on the condition of anonymity to protect the student reviewer from retaliation. This gives students the ability to be honest, as corroborated by a number of studies, including one conducted in 2011 regarding mental health self-reporting by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both these platforms engender this honesty, but only RMP makes its responses public.
RMP is often subject to criticisms for giving students, who are disgruntled by their final grade in a challenging class, the agency to post unfair or retaliatory evaluations of little utility under the veil of anonymity. Nevertheless, students’ agency to voice negative complaints, even if it can be abused at some times, is exactly why RMP is important.
While shopping for courses, we’re looking for something beyond the polished description you can find in a course catalog. We want to know how the sausage is made, how the course is run, and whether or not it will be intellectually stimulating. While it can be used as a space for negative complaints about professors, RMP is also a space where professors can receive duly-earned praise from their students. Not only can this attract students to professors that are exceptional instructors, but it can also reward professors—even to a small degree—for making an impact in the classroom.
RMP, even with its flaws, plays a crucial role in student course selection. Thanks to its reviews, the rest of us can make well-informed decisions about our course selections as we design our semester schedule. The platform gives students the ability to freely express their opinions of university courses, and it allows their peers to weigh both the positives and the negatives of a course so that they may fill their schedules with as many engaging courses as their hearts desire.
Artwork by Nicole Mousad