2008 Woodie Awards
RateMyProfessor causing controversy
Theresa Vosilla
Issue date: 9/28/06 Section: Features
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Most college students will admit to saying that they've had a professor like this before and wish they knew this before enrolling in the course.
For some students the solution to this problem might be a website called Ratemyprofessor.com.
"RateMyProfessor.com (RMP) is America's largest collection of college professor ratings (5,300,000) with user base of over 8,000,000 college students. RMP now expands to colleges and universities across the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland,
" states the site's Press Release.
"Every semester, millions of students use RateMyProfessors.com to plan their class schedules, which in turn improves the quality of their educations," said John Swapceinski, founder, RMP.
The site allows students to leave comments about their professors and also rate their "hottness" by awarding them chilli peppers.
"But the site's real purpose is to drive traffic to the company's Swooks website, which sells textbooks" states Money.cnn .com.
The site is currently recieveing a lot of attention; most of it is protest from universities and professors, many of them who are featured on the site.
Free speech, opinion and telling the truth is permited, but where is the line drawn when false information and untrue remarks begin to damage careers.
When is this considered defamation, and therefore could potentialy become ground for a lawsuit?
Many are saying that the ratings are unfair and could have a negative impact because there are no guarantees that the information provided is correct or acurate.
"In many cases professors with terrible ratings teach required courses, so many of the students in the classes don't want to be there and this attitude could impact their view of the course and professor before they even get there," said Sara Lizzo, senior, Rockland County, N.Y.
"The owner of Ratemyprofessor.com says the site does track IP addresses to minimize a user's ability to review the same person multiple times. Also, each school's page has a student administrator who reviews all submissions. Professors or anyone else who disputes a review can red flag it. The administrator will take a second look to see if it should be edited or deleted," stated ABC News, ABC Local.
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