Anna Dunn
If it’s the middle of the semester and you’re sitting alone in your room with tear-filled eyes wondering why you’re knee-deep in English 112 assignments when the focus should be on major requirements, it might be time to take a step back and see where exactly things went wrong.
Trust me, it is not that the class is hard. I personally breezed through English 112, and it was not just because of my mediocre writing skills. It’s because I used Rate My Professor.
Rate my professor is like Tinder but for figuring out the next four months of life. Each professor at Colorado Mesa University (CMU) has a profile on Rate My Professor – whether they like it or not.
I learned about Rate My Professor after my first semester at CMU, and I needed it. As a high schooler taking college classes concurrently, I never learned about this treasure. I was just a little high schooler who had to write a whole new psychology paper for a community college class while trying to celebrate my high school graduation and contemplating trying to send my transcripts to CMU.
Looking back four years later, that professor at my old community college had a low rating of 2.1 from other students who had suffered through this general education psychology class. This was the lowest rating I had ever seen on any professor in my years of sorting through this system.
I will always have so much respect for my first-year roommate who introduced me to this website. It’s a hidden treasure. Students who know about it use it all the time.
I’ve heard so many stories of students weighed down by gen eds. In my history class, we only had to do a 5-minute presentation about what each student found interesting for the final. For my midterm, we played group jeopardy and won pieces of gold! How did I find out about this professor? Rate My Professor.
Though it can be an amazing tool, Rate My Professor is also something to use with restraint. In another class, I sat through just a couple of weeks until I started a mental rant about my professor because he was very strict, and I took feedback from his ratings on the website.
I was one bad class away from posting this rating until I realized he was just a sweet professor who cared about what he was teaching. By the end of the semester, my self-restraint came through, and I gave him one of the best reviews I could have given.
Don’t struggle through hard classes if you don’t have to. Rate My Professor can provide insight into any bad experience a student ever had and decided to share, but don’t always take it to heart.