In one semester, I’ll be a senior. Crazy. And yet, I am still nervous whenever a new semester starts, because I don’t know what will happen in class. What if the test questions are worded in such an abstract way that I can’t figure out what’s even going on? What if I end up not understanding the topic the professor is lecturing on? First of all, how do they even teach the class?
Whenever these questions arise, I go to friends who have already taken the classes to ask my questions. Sometimes, however, I end up taking courses that only a few students take every year, or I find that my learning experience is different from what my friends described it to be. The popular website “Rate My Professors” can be quite handy in cases like these. The following are some tips for navigating this tool.
Don’t use the website as your only resource.
The thing is, this website is helpful only when there are several quality reviews. It would be careless to decide whether a professor might deliver a great or horrible learning experience solely because of a single person’s opinion. I remember being intimidated when attending my first day of Dr. Goodwin’s Foundations of Biology after one of my friends told me about the horrors of this class. But I ended up being that one upperclassman who tells everyone to take Dr. Goodwin’s class, because his classes are excellent! So, it might be wiser to utilize several tools when gathering information about your classes. Meet and talk with several people–I recommend speaking with TAs and tutors if you’re not familiar with other students in the department. Read several reviews. Maybe even ask the professor how they teach in class. The more sources you utilize, the better an idea you will have about how the course works. This way, you can better determine whether it fits your learning style or not.
Be mindful of the dates the reviews were written.
Another thing students should be mindful of is the dates the reviews were written. Reviews for professors at Andrews University may date all the way back to the early 2000s. Many changes could have been made between then and now, including the course difficulty or even the professor’s teaching style. If the reviews are too old, the best option would be to ask the upperclassmen or use social media platforms like Instagram to ask the student community what they thought of the course.
No news is good news.
If your professors are not listed on the website, I would not worry much about it. As the saying goes, “No news is good news.” I tend to find people leaving reviews more for bad experiences than for good experiences, unless they are a dedicated reviewer, or their experience was exceptional. If nobody took the time to express their thoughts about their classes, they likely earned what they wanted to gain from that class. In other words, they most likely had satisfactory communication with the professors, good learning experiences, and fair grades.
You might be worried that this phenomenon of not having enough reviews occurs only because Andrews is a small school, but it also happens in many more prominent schools. In fact, the top three professors at Michigan State University have each received 23, 12, and 11 reviews, while top professors at Andrews have 18, 16, and 12 reviews. Meanwhile, MSU’s professors with low student ratings easily had 44, 52, 28, or more student reviews.
So don’t be too concerned about how many reviews you see for your professors. Each person’s experience is different. If some reviews are leaving you skeptical of the course, talk to other students who have taken the course previously. Remember that you also have a week at the beginning of the semester to decide whether you want to commit to a class or drop it, so you always get to see for yourself what the course is like before passing a final judgment. If dropping the class is not a choice, and an alternative option is not available, you will at least have emotional support from “Rate My Professors” to help you realize that you are not the only one!
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.