A recent Kaplan Test Prep survey showed that almost half of college students use Web sites like RateMyProfessors.com to select classes that are rated as easy, which may be a factor in grade inflation at colleges across the nation.
Jeff Olson, vice president of research at Kaplan Test Prep, said that the effects of professor rating sites have been underreported in the analysis of grade inflation over the past two decades. The average public university GPA has risen from 2.93 in 1991 to 3.11 in 2006, while the average GPA for private universities has risen from 3.09 to 3.30.
"College is competitive — getting into law, medical and graduate school is competitive," Olson told the Daily.
Some suspect that this grade inflation has been occurring over the past decade in part because students seek easy classes through professor−rating Web sites. Grade inflation is a growing issue, as graduate school admissions officers struggle to assess students based on their GPA.
Admissions officers look for a standard by which they can fairly judge applicants, Olson explained. "People have mixed feelings about standardized tests, but as grade inflation occurs, people look more to tests for a standard," he said.
While 46 percent of the 1,229 college students and recent graduates surveyed used RateMyProfessors.com to select classes based on a professor's "easy grading reputation," 77 percent of students chose based on the prior comments by other students, 70 percent chose based on the "overall quality of a professor," and 66 percent chose based on the "engaging teaching style of a professor."
Sophomore Andrew Vidikan explained that RateMyProfessors.com is useful for choosing between sections of a class. "I don't think anyone really wants to take a class that is extremely difficult when they could take the same class with a different professor for a better grade," he said.
While there is speculation that RateMyProfessors.com enables students to find professors that grade less harshly, the Web site is certainly not the only resource that students turn to when selecting a course. "I haven't used RateMyProfessors. Most of the time I talk to my friends who are also pre−med," sophomore Adrian Banerji said.
While students do have some choices as to what classes they take, some have less flexibility because certain majors have required courses.
"I feel like the structure of academic programming in the engineering school is such that sites like RateMyProfessors.com don't really alter our choices in classes, because we don't really have choices in classes," sophomore engineering student Victor Minden said.
Even though many students use Web sites like RateMyProfessors.com, the survey showed that on a scale of one to 10, with one being "not at all reliable" and 10 being "very reliable," the average rating for the Web site's reliability was only 5.8.
"The ratings on it are a little biased, because students mainly go there to complain, so the reviews may not exactly be accurate about what goes on in the class," Vidikan said.
Only eight percent of students visit RateMyProfessors.com to write reviews of professors, which, Olson explained, could account for some of the site's unreliability. "There is a small reviewing group compared to the large number of people who read the reviews, so the small minority has a lot of influence," he said.
Three percent of students surveyed said a professor's "hotness" rating was a factor in their course selection. Olson called the "hotness" option of RateMyProfessors.com a "dark side" of the Web site, and he was glad that only a small percentage of students was influenced by this factor.
"Rating the attractiveness of the teachers can be kind of cruel," Olson said.
The survey was based on responses by college students and recent graduates from both U.S. and Canadian colleges that had concentrations in either pre−law or pre−med.
