RateMyProfessors.com offers biased evaluations

Abstract

RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is becoming an increasingly popular tool among students, faculty and school administrators. The validity of RMP is a point of debate; many would argue that self‐selection bias obscures the usefulness of RMP evaluations. In order to test this possibility, we collected three types of evaluations: RMP evaluations that existed at the beginning of our study, traditional in‐class evaluations and RMP evaluations that were prompted after we collected in‐class evaluations. We found differences in the types of evaluations students provide for their professors for both perceptions of professor clarity and ratings of professor easiness. Based on these results, conclusions drawn from RMP are suspect and indeed may offer a biased view of professors.

Keywords:

• student evaluation
• RateMyProfessors.com
• RMP
• online evaluations
• in‐class evaluations

Acknowledgement

We thank Lauren Beam, Katie Brown, Christian O’Brien, James Adams and Kylie Barefoot for their assistance with the project.

Notes

1. Angela Legg is now at University of California, Riverside, and can be reached at [email protected].

2. A poster presenting a portion of this study was presented at the 2009 Southeastern Teaching of Psychology conference in Atlanta, GA.