Think your professor sucks? See if the data backs you up

Students love it. Professors loathe it. They all check the damn website anyway.

Rate My Professors, for all its flaws, is one of the few places students can learn about potential professors during the twice-annual scramble of course selection. There are myriad problems with the website, which publishes user-generated reviews of professors.

Namely: Disgruntled students are poor judges of pedagogy. Unfortunately, we can’t help with that.

Some problems, though, are solvable. For instance, the website doesn’t allow users to review faculty ratings across an entire university, and it’s impossible to fairly compare professors who have different numbers of reviews.

So we got creative. Our team developed a custom web scraper that pulled RMP reviews into a database, then assigned weighted scores to each professor that allow for fair comparisons.

The weighting considers raw scores then adjusts them based on the number of reviews a given professor has, ensuring, for instance, that those with only a handful of reviews aren’t punished for having one vindictive student.

The table below lets you search by name and department. Click any header to sort by that category, or click again to sort in reverse. Professors’ names are hyperlinked with their live RMP profiles.

We had a little fun with it, too. Our team fed USC’s over 64,000 reviews into ChatGPT and asked it to generate a one-word summary for each professor, which you can see in the “vibe” column. (Of course, read these with some skepticism.)

“I’m deeply honored,” said engineering professor Paulo Branicio (4.86, brilliant), when contacted about his first-overall ranking. “Though I should note that popularity metrics can be quite subjective. I’ve always held that direct and honest student feedback is the most valuable resource for any educator.”

As Branicio noted, the data comes with biases. Among them: Professors who students rank as teaching more “difficult” courses typically receive lower popularity scores.

These biases also appear when comparing reviews across different USC departments. “STEM” professors are more likely to find themselves on the receiving end of vicious reviews than their colleagues in the liberal arts — potentially because of differences like course material and class size.

The table below considers raw average ratings among professors in a given department. Similar to the first table, it then factors in how many professors have been reviewed in each department to allow for a more fair comparison.

Popularity isn’t everything, though. In theory, the school’s best professors will force students to engage with challenging material while still receiving high ratings. That's exactly what the table below measures.

The “residual” shows how unexpectedly high a professor’s popularity score is given their difficulty rating; the higher the number, the more unexpected.

“USC students are remarkably discerning,” said accounting professor Michael Paranal (4.1, legendary). “They value substance and want their time in the classroom to be meaningful. When you set clear expectations, provide thoughtful structure, and give them the tools to succeed, they don’t shy away from rigor, they’ll rise to meet it.”

Whether RMP reviews hold serious sway over students’ enrollment decisions is an open question. But several professors said students often tell them they indeed check the website — and that they themselves scan the reviews.

“I check my ratings from time to time,” said cinema professor Aniko Imre (4.4, knowledgable). “I also check other professors I know or encounter. It is a problematic indicator, of course, but it does show some aspects of one's professional personality that we can't really access otherwise. I think it has its place.”

Still, Imre said most professors she knows dismiss RMP, at least publicly.

The school’s lowest-rated professor — Catherine Skibo (1.47, nightmarish) — did not respond to a request for comment.

We’re sure many of you will have strong thoughts. Want to submit a comment? Email [email protected] with the subject “Letter to the Editor.”

Responses may be edited for length and clarity, and professors WILL be cited with their ranking and “vibe.”