Is your professor a red jalapeno pepper?
Like many life forms that crawl forth from the Internet’s pools of primordial ooze, RateMyProfessors.com isn’t so much a new beast -- it’s just a faster, bigger, hungrier version of an offline ancestor.
In this case, the ancestor is word-of-mouth-ausaurus. Its Internet progeny now has bigger teeth, a mean pair of wings, and lots of pop-up ads.
The idea behind RateMyProfessors is simple -- students “grade” professors, and fellow students can log on for inside dope on a given instructor before signing up for a course.
The site claims to have amassed nearly 4 million ratings on more than 600,000 professors at 5,000 schools around the United States.
Here’s how it works: Register with the website, affiliating yourself with a college in the site’s database (the site doesn’t verify your claim, so you’re free to fake).
Then pick a professor’s name, and score his or her desirability on four factors: “Easiness,” “Helpfulness,” “Clarity” and “Hotness Total.” Hey, I know that when I’m choosing an instructor for Quantum Physics 101 or Thermonuclear Weapons for Dummies, Hotness Total is of paramount importance!
Professors who earn high marks are tagged with an orange smiley face. Average profs get a lime-green comatose smiley, devoid of emotion. Instructors nobody likes are shamed for all online eternity with a blue frownie.
The hot ones get a special bonus: little red jalapeno peppers, like tiaras in an Internet beauty contest, next to their names.
Students have been evaluating their teachers for as long as the reverse has been true. If you went to college, you no doubt remember conversing with pals about which professors were tough, who seemed clueless or cruel, and who would go out of their way to make sure their students succeeded. And, OK -- who was hot or not.
Shifting those hallway gossip sessions to the Internet seems inevitable, as does the idea of linking up discussions from schools around the country. If it can be networked, following the law of the Internet, sooner or later it will.
But a few things are troublesome here. First, the choking barrage of animated banner ads and pop-ups promising free PCs -- that aren’t -- to lure lazy clickers into parting with cash.
The site promises that you can avoid the pop-ups and “most of the ads” by forking over $9.95 a year for a membership -- but puh-lease. RateMyProfessors feels more like an excuse to sell ads and gather e-mail addresses than a genuine, grass-roots community resource for students.
There are bigger issues at play here, beyond the merits of this one site -- which, by the way, I’d grade with a blue frownie.
The ability to speak online with anonymity is what makes the Internet such a powerful aid to freedom of speech. Preserving that right is of paramount importance.
But as anyone who’s spent five minutes in a tech website forum or a public chat room can attest, large herds of anonymous speakers can be cruel at times. When people are free to blather with no personal accountability, sometimes what they choose to say is inflammatory, mean-spirited, or just plain untrue.
This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have the right to remain anonymous online. The benefits of open, unrestricted speech far outweigh any downsides.
But it does mean that you might want to take anything you read on RateMyProfessors with a pixel of salt. Caveat Internettor is my advice. And if you really want to know which profs are hot or not, you may get better intel from real, live students or alums you know share your sensibilities.
A pitch for those $9.95-a-year memberships on RateMyProfessors says, “You spend a tremendous amount of time and money on your college education. Isn’t it worth a few dollars to get the most out of it?” Sure, but you could probably accomplish that by spending $9.95 on some pencils, a pocket dictionary and a can of Red Bull to help you stay awake while you study whatever that jalapeno-studded sociology professor assigned.
