Description of the site:

The site, Ratemyprofessors.com is a chance for students from all over the world to participate collaboratively on a website. People communicate with each other in this community through a rating system and by adding comments. Professors are rated by each individual user on a scale of 1 to 5 on three different categories, those being, easiness, helpfulness and clarity.

At the top of each page the cumulative average is listed for each category. Also the total number of rating is told. The comments which are posted are also categorized in a way. The date of the post is listed along with what class is being critiqued. 

Then the visitor of the site, most likely students, can type out comments explaining how they felt or why they rated the professor that way. Also, ratemyprofessor.com recently added a feature which allows students to post quotes spoken by the professor. A controversial aspect of the rating system would be the symbol of a chili pepper which is placed on a professor’s profile if students decide to rate them as “hott.”

Ratemyprofessors.com has over 5.3 million ratings which represent about 737,000 professors and 5,800 schools (Solnik).  It also gets about 2 million page views daily during one school year (Solnik).

It’s a site for students created by a student. John Swapceinski created the site due to a bad experience he had at San Jose University. He allegedly had a an instructor who made his life miserable. Swapceinski commented that “If I could have looked [her] up on the Web, I could have avoided all that” (Giegerich). Swapceinski is now a software engineer in Northern California.

*Picture from Yahoo! Images*