Created in 1999, Rate My Professors claimed “to provide a safe forum to share classroom experiences to help fellow students make critical education choices” — just as The Boot was created to provide a spacious bar for legal adults. Apparently, the “critical education choices” in question included the attractiveness of one’s professor because the website offered students a “chili pepper” rating that measured the professor’s hotness.   

Only in recent years has the phrase “Rate My Professors” related to anything regarding education. In 2014, the Rate My Professors Instagram account announced, as an April Fool’s Day prank, a name change to “Date My Professors,” and the next year, its Twitter account implored followers to retweet “…if you’ve ever picked a professor’s class based on the Chili Pepper.”  

When, in the following years, several female professors, outraged at their career’s work being reduced to a graphic of a blazing vegetable, demanded the removal of the hotness rating, the website denied having ever intended a sexual connotation, but complied, nevertheless. Having lost its “spiciness,” the website was forced to refashion itself into something serious and educational — and it fooled everyone.  

For such a prominent institution — and that is what it is nowadays — Rate My Professors is fraudulent. Many college kids never take a professor whose rating is below four stars, and many of those who do have nightmares about it. College counselors, parents and older siblings all insist that taking a class without glimpsing the professor’s reviews is like crossing the street with your eyes closed.  

This cult worships a false god. Rate My Professors requires no verification, so that any user can rate any professor and do so multiple times with different devices and IP addresses. Across Reddit, professors boast about leaving horrendous comments on their own pages to repel bad students from their classes.  

Cunning girls on TikTok posted elaborate tutorials on how to sink your terrible professor’s rating into an inescapable abyss. And there must have been a few instances, although I have no proof, of a competitive professor giving one of his colleagues a one-star review.  

The website does have moderators who sometimes delete posts but only for profanity and other inappropriate language; anything that focuses on the professor’s teaching remains. Its efforts to ensure faithfulness extend no further than a feeble plea in the oxymoronic community guidelines section: “Be honest in your reviews.”  

Even if we ignore technical flaws and suppose that most of its users are real students of the reviewed professors, it would still be a bad source; Rate My Professors is simply too emotional. To represent a professor’s overall rating would require a review from every one of their students — the normal ones as well as the maniacs.  

But an optional website draws only those students who adore or despise their professor enough to go out of their way and leave a rating or a comment; students who find their professor insignificant, forgettable or just alright, have little incentive to do the same. The professor’s “overall rating” thus reflects not a general or random bunch of students but a skewed selection of lovers and haters. 

The two kinds of “reviews” distinct to Rate My Professors are on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The first kind is the most notorious: those diatribes that squeeze 14 insults— the professor is boring, has horrible handwriting, talks weirdly, coughs too loudly, etc. — into five furious sentences and then insist that one star out of five is too generous.  

The second kind will say something like this: “I was battling depression during my freshman year and wanted to give up. But one day, Professor Smith saw me lying face-down on the sidewalk on Bourbon Street and asked me if I was okay. He ended up becoming my favorite professor and now eats Thanksgiving dinners with my family. I have served 16 years under his tutelage, and he is the godfather of my children. Five stars is not enough!” 

If a teacher has a moderate rating, there is a very solid chance that their comments will contain not a consistent collection of moderate reviews, but a risky mixture of love letters and death wishes. Moderate reviews exist, as do positive and negative ones whose praise or criticism rests on solid reasoning, but many read as though they were either punched into the keyboard with curled fists or lifted from a line in “Dead Poets Society.” It is from these reviews — these emotional outbursts from unverified users — that we mold our schedules.