I don’t trust Rate My Professor and you shouldn’t either

By Rhiannon Evans, October 30 2025—

Rate My Professor is an unreliable resource for both students and instructors. It causes students and instructors to care more about reviews and ratings than actual learning or teaching. 

We’ve all been in this situation: it’s two, maybe three weeks into the semester, and you’re sitting in class unsure if you’re vibing with your professor or not. So what do you do? Hit up Rate My Professor, of course.

As you’re going down the list of reviews and ratings, you’ll likely land on one out of two opinions.

1. This professor seems decent — I’m excited for the rest of the semester!
2. This professor seems to be the worst — I’m screwed forever. 

However, after having similar experiences myself, I’ve found myself asking the question: Is Rate My Professor really that reliable? 

For anyone unfamiliar with the website ratemyprofessor.com, it’s a place where students can write reviews for and give ratings to professors within their institutions. It has become a popular place to get an early idea of how a professor teaches their class before taking a course. The ratings often include how tough a grader the professor is, if participation matters and if the textbook is necessary. On the surface, this is a decent resource for students and a good way to provide anonymous feedback to professors. 

However, upon looking closer, I’ve noticed some massive flaws in this system. 

Firstly, anyone can write a review, which means the person writing may or may not have even taken a class with the specific professor you are looking at. This means Rate My Professor is rife for “review bombing a process popular on movie reviewing sites that details large groups giving poor reviews and ratings to controversial films to dissuade others from seeing it. 

Review bombing is typically carried out for discriminatory reasons, such as the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it lesbian kiss in Lightyear or when people complained about a Black Halle Bailey being cast as the traditionally white Disney princess Ariel in The Little Mermaid reboot.

Another reason Rate My Professor can’t be perceived as a reliable source is because learning is subjective. Not every student is going to learn the same way, or be interested in the same topics, and not every professor is going to teach or grade in the same way. Material I find hard might not be for you, and vice versa, which is why students should really take advantage of office hours and connect with TAs instead of relying on potentially unfounded reviews — or at least reviews that don’t correlate with your learning style or interests. They are there to help you with whatever you may be struggling with in class. 

I also see this as a great opportunity to connect with your peers. I cannot stress enough how many times I’ve made some great connections and friendships when I asked for help on material from my peers. It’s a great way to meet people, and you also (hopefully) get any questions you need answered — it’s a win-win!

On that note, students are not the only ones getting a disservice from this website; instructors are, too. I’ve mainly encountered two different responses from instructors based on their reviews. Some instructors take the feedback and try to correct their teaching style, which isn’t a bad thing; however, some instructors will try to pander to their ratings, which risks academic integrity. 

I have had professors in the past boast about their high rating while nudging their students to similarly rate them highly. But on the other side, I’ve seen professors boast about their low rating as a way to showcase how challenging their course is. Ultimately, neither of these responses are particularly helpful, because they both get away from the whole point of university — to teach students.

This fixation on ratings is doing a disservice to both instructors and students. 

A good teacher should not be measured by an arbitrary rating on a website, but by what students get out of it. And that’s a highly individualized quantification, whether that be attaining a good final grade, expanding a student’s horizons of learning or gaining a new perspective on a subject. 

The purpose of taking a university class and learning from an expert in that field is to gain one thing: knowledge, not ratings. If you don’t jive with the class or the professor, you can always drop a course, but you shouldn’t base your education on the words of a random internet persona or a number of stars. 

It speaks to a failure of thinking critically about your needs and your future, which is truly just missing the entire point of post-secondary education in the first place.