My graduate advisor is still teaching and has some of the hightest ratings I’ve seen, just as she did when I was her student. I just don’t get it. I like her, but her teaching sucked. She was hardly ever prepared; I saw her once 15 minutes before class taking notes from an open text book so she’d having something to teach in the graduate level class.
But people love her, I think because she’s sincerely concerned about her students’ welfare. But she’s still not someone I would have recommended if you actually wanted to learn something.
I read the website because I know there are other serious students like me who post useful comments. Plus, even the most boneheaded comment says something about either the poster or the teacher. For example, when I see a post like “OMGOMGOMG LOL TEH CLASE IS SO HARD LOLOL I GOT A D” I know I’ll probably do well in the class.
So many of the professors from my (former, maybe future) college (shout out to Rilchiam [and someone else, I think]) have fairly low ‘ease’ scores but high overall ratings. Even the few ratings that basically say “this man is boiled down, condensed, and bottled evil and he takes joy in making students cry”* use decent grammer and spelling. Of course, the whole page is pretty much irrelevant to that school, because you don’t get to chose your classes, so it’s not like there’s a lot riding on it.
*Fun fact: This is true about the professor. He told my freshman class he likes to teach freshman classes “to thin the herd” (eg, get as many people to drop out as he can. Four people from that class [of 18] are no longer at the college).
I figured it would be nice to give Dr. X a little anonymity, since it’s not like he knows I’m talking about him. Plus it gives you all something to turn your creative minds loose on.
With a sigh of relief, I can report that the site ranks my mom a 4.8 overall (and says she’s nice, which I can vouch for), but – and this is critical to my peace of mind-- has no rating on her “hotness” quality. I don’t think I could stand it if those kids were rating my mom’s hotness. That’s just gross.
Anyone could have done that as a joke. His colleagues might have done it. Heck, he could have done it himself. You don’t have to be a student to post a rating and a chili pepper.
One of my favorite professors was actually one of the toughest-so I hope the ease score doesn’t lower the rating.
For another favorite professor, this amuses me:
That should be U.S., dumbass. (Said professor was a refugee from the USSR in the early 1980s).
Something weird-when I’m logged in, I see LESS of the listings than when I wasn’t logged in. WTF?
Sadly, none of my professors I remember are on the list.
Of course, I mostly drifted through undergrad majoring in drinking beer.
10 years later, in Grad school, at a different college, I was a LOT more focused.
Man, I loved Grad school.
A professor who was published both professionally and commercially who came into class every time without a single note or piece of paper, leaned up against her desk, and lead a 2-hour class vibrantly off the cuff every damn time.
Classes with full bird colonels from the local air force base who would break into something a prof said with “I just don’t think that is right” and the killer class debates that followed.
One of my high school classmates wound up as a professor at the college I attended. He’s still there, with a 4.8 out of 5 overall rating, drawing such comments as:
Warms my heart to see the outstanding qualities Vinnie showed way back in high school still shine through.
I just looked up my old school. One of my favorite undergraduate professors is getting consistently good ratings – and the students are leaving intelligent comments, too!
I’m so happy that other people like her as much as I did.
Maybe it’s just that I primarily speak Mexican Spanish (a dialect which often uses its word for ‘chili pepper’ to mean ‘penis’) with my girlfriend, but I thought of something entirely different there, at first.
Made know? A creative knowledge? Mets? Yankees? Clouds?
Yay! My favorite professor has wonderful reviews, written by literate people. I have also looked up a couple of professor friends here in town. My brother, as a measly graduate student teacher, doesn’t seem to have a review.
I had to give a bad rating to a math professor I had years ago. He would rush through everything and when we’d ask him to slow down, he’d grumble and whine, “But I want to get to the GOOD STUFF!”
This site is much more active for my school, as well. So I checked out some of my professors. Some of the comments are sadly off.
I can’t really speak to how easy it is to get an A in her class, since I’m one of those nasty overachievers, but the claim about having too much discussion time is ridiculous. It’s only too much discussion time if you haven’t read the book. And we’ve never discussed anything for more than half the class period. Since she teaches literature classes, discuss is what you do, since lecturing isn’t exactly conducive to teaching how to think critically about a text. And the thing about wearing only plain black dresses definitely isn’t true. She wears pastels, for god’s sake. Neither is this true:
She has way more integrity than that. If by favorites you mean “students who actually do the work and are willing to discuss things” then I suppose that might be right.
And this:
Ugh. I cannot even imagine how this can be true. (Aside from the nice guy part. I had a low blood sugar during a meeting with him once and got a little weird, and he was calm and understanding through the whole thing.) He’s highly intelligent and informed about everything. He made our Brit Lit II survey class interesting. I can’t believe it.
I guess what I’m most dismayed at is that so many people complain about talking about the same topic over and over when that’s the topic of the course, and having to do a lot of reading for upper-level English classes. What were they expecting? That they would get to pick their noses and sing the chorus to “Devil Went Down to Georgia”?
