A massive, free crowd-rating board for college professors, but the ratings are anonymous and unverified, and researchers say they track likeability and easiness more than teaching quality.
What it's really for Crowd ratings of college professors; ad-supported, self-reported, and easily skewed.
What our grade covers The grade on this page is about its student ratings of professors, not everything the site does.
High Scoring Confidence Checked against primary sources. We are confident in the facts and the grade here.
Advertisers pay it most via display ads and the Taboola feed; professors and schools are not ranked in exchange for payment, so placement is not sold.
Source →- Operating since
- 1999 (27 years) · source
- What it costs you
- Free to read The reviews are free to read.
- How they make money
- It makes money from advertising on its high-traffic site (an ad-heavy layout, plus a Taboola content feed added after the 2018 Cheddar acquisition).
- What they do
- It lets students post 1-5 ratings and short comments on individual college professors for "overall quality" and "difficulty," aggregating millions of self-reported reviews.
- What to watch for
- Anyone can post without proving they took the class, so reviews can be padded, grudge-driven, or, by reporting from the Chronicle and others, posted by professors themselves; treat scores as crowd sentiment, not vetted evaluation.
- Composite score
- 2.50 / 5.00 → grade C
How the grade was reached
Does the site take money from the very entities it ranks? Pay-for-placement, vendor-funded data, and affiliate commissions all pull this down. The less the ranking can be bought, the higher the score.
What is the ranking actually built on? Hands-on testing scores highest, then verified first-hand reviews, then opinion or popularity surveys and self-reported figures, then pay-to-rank, which scores lowest.
Is the methodology published, specific, and reproducible? Can a reader see how a given rank was reached, or is it a black box?
Are commercial relationships, sponsorships, and affiliate arrangements disclosed clearly and near the rankings themselves, rather than buried?
How hard is it to game? Controls against fake reviews, solicited reviews, and vendor gaming raise this; an open box anyone can stuff lowers it.
Evidence
- Founded in 1999 by software engineer John Swapceinski (originally TeacherRatings.com); users rate professors 1-5 on quality and difficulty, the site does not require an account, and research finds students give higher ratings to instructors they judge as easy, exhibiting a 'halo' / 'likeability' effect rather than measuring teaching quality. Source: Wikipedia - Rate My Professors →
- Cheddar bought RateMyProfessors from Viacom in 2018; the site drew ~6-7M students/month and ~125,000-300,000 new ratings monthly across 20M total ratings, and is monetized through advertising including a Taboola infinite-scroll feed. Source: TechCrunch - Cheddar buys Rate My Professors from Viacom →
- Reporting documents that padding ratings is common, with some professors creating fake profiles or posting glowing self-reviews to offset negative ones; because reviews are anonymous and unverified, the platform is vulnerable to fake, solicited, and grudge ratings. Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education - The Art of the Bogus Rating →