Many professors laugh off their reviews at RateMyProfessors — after all, “hotness,” one of the site’s metrics (connoted by a chili pepper), doesn’t really translate to tenure or promotion. Yet some research suggests that, like it or not, the site’s ratings correlate with ratings professors earn on their institutions’ student evaluations of teaching.
Other research suggests those more formal student evaluations of teaching are unreliable, as well. Yet colleges and universities still use them, often to inform high-stakes personnel decisions.
So a new study of 7.9 million ratings on RateMyProfessors claiming to provide “further insight into student perceptions of academic instruction and possible variables in student evaluations” is at least interesting.
