Websites like Ratemyprofessor are an useful tool for students while trying to determine which classes they want to enrol in. However, these reviews are public, and sometimes those who are being reviewed check to see EXACTLY how their students feel about them.
Here, professors reveal the most outrageous reviews they’ve ever read about themselves on ratemyprofessor.
1/29. “You get really nervous, but you shouldn’t be, because you teach statistics and no one really cares about statistics.”
This was after my first semester as a Graduate teaching assistant.
2/29. One of my professors was so happy about one of his reviews that he decided to share it with the class the next semester. The review was “He may look like Gandhi but he grades like Hitler.”
3/29. My father is a organic chemistry professor at my college. He’s told me that he never reads ratemyprofessor, he said he would be nervous to get a bad review and have that throw him off. He has a 4.6 rating though and according to RMP is “da man”. He’s the type of professor who will extend office hours and work individually with students who need extra help. Even though he could retire at this point he actually genuinely enjoys teaching the subject of chemistry and doing research within the labs.
4/29. “Best professor, lets me skip every other class.”
I have no knowledge of this… I have no idea who it is.
5/29. “He’s an awkward guy, but he has a giant bulge in his pants.”
Continue onto the next page for more!
6/29. Apparently I’m “sweet” and I have a chilli pepper. Not exactly what I was going for as a teacher…
7/29. My Calc 3 professor told us on the last day about some of the stuff he has read about himself. The one I remember him talking about most was:
“He is very oddly shaped and flails his arms about to try and depict 3D shapes”
His response was:
“Even though I do flail my arms, I believe I am not oddly shaped. Just look at me…this is 100% math bod right here”.
8/29. Checked about a teacher that no one really liked. One of the reviews was “I hold my farts in everyday just to release them in his class”.
9/29. My wife got hot peppers. All hot peppers. And that she’s very passionate about her subject, but too strict and tough.
She thought it was fair, mostly. She thinks her students are lazy and rely too much on their knowledge of a similar language.
10/29. Best worst review I’ve ever had: “I’d rather have a root canal without anesthetic than sit through another one of her classes. Also, she should wear more makeup.”
Continue onto the next page for more!
11/29. “She came into class half waisted.”
Not only is that not true but I was teaching a composition class.
Waisted. Shudder.
12/29. I just looked up my prof brother. Someone said they could bounce a quarter off his butt (I think they mean he has a nice butt?).
13/29. My dad is a 65 year-old Chinese man who teaches a Chinese film class. He has a red pepper. Why people, why?
14/29. I have an uncle who’s a professor of Business. I showed him his reviews, and he thought they were hilarious. One of the reviews called him a “pint-sized lump of sarcasm.”
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15/29. My dad gets really great reviews usually along the lines of, “makes a difficult class interesting, helps out if you seek it, funny, can be strict and doesn’t like people who don’t try”. One day, some girl in his class failed. She had extremely terrible grammar and did very poorly on all of her essays.
This student thought she would be able to get her revenge by posting a completely negative review saying how he was “a jerk, terrible teacher”,etc. He was a little shocked at first but then he noticed the poor grammar and laughed about it to me.
Continue onto the next page for more!
16/29. Not from a site, but my favorite from hard-copy student evaluations. It was just four words, scrawled across the page, all in caps: ARROGANT, FAT, HAIRY JERK.
I have a copy of it framed on the wall in my office, where every student who visits can see it.
17/29. I’m at a 4.8 overall. 4.8 for helpfulness, 4.9 for clarity, and 3.2 for easiness. No chilli peppers, which is fine by me.
The only problem is that I’m still listed under my old school. Been teaching at a new one for four years now… not sure how to get that changed.
18/29. I did have a professor once upon a time who liked to pick favorites. I had her again a year later and I thought it was strange that she suddenly didn’t play favorites anymore. A few weeks later, she mentioned that she had searched herself on ratemyprofessors before the semester and was devastated when she saw what was written.
I guess she took it to heart.
19/29. My father is a organic chemistry professor at my college. He’s told me that he never reads ratemyprofessor, he said he would be nervous to get a bad review and have that throw him off. He has a 4.6 rating though and according to RMP is “da man”. He’s the type of professor who will extend office hours and work individually with students who need extra help. Even though he could retire at this point he actually genuinely enjoys teaching the subject of chemistry and doing research within the labs.
20/29. “Before I took this class I had a cactus and a girlfriend. I spent so much time doing HW that my girlfriend left me for an art student and my cactus died from neglect.”
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21/29. During my first year of teaching my friends wanted to check how I was doing. Turns out I can’t be rated because my last name is Wang and the website don’t allow ‘rude’ words’.
22/29. I got one chilli or whatever it is which was nice. Other than that I got moderate in all categories.
23/29. I am easily sucked into tangents, am very transparent about who I like/hate, am hilarious, and will steal and eat any food that a student has brought to class.
Definitely agree with those charges. The only food that survived in my presence were Hot Cheetos. That crap is gross.
24/29. I was teaching a class to 1st year grad students in Medical Physics, called Computer applications in Radiation Therapy. This was back in the early ’70s, when this was cutting edge stuff.
I set up a class project to write a computer simulation of intersecting radiation fields. Actually pretty simple stuff that I could have written myself in about a week.
But, I distributed the work among the students, coached them on the Fortran and the physics, and at the end of the class we got it published in a good journal, with every one of these previously unpublished grad students listed as an author.
One of them wrote a derogatory rating saying that I “was using his students to write programs for him.”
25/29. Students who truly want to go into the field love me, say they’ve learned a ton and that I go out of my way to help them find internships and jobs. (I really love my field, so if they’re passionate for it, I’m happy to help.)
Students who hate me complain that I give too much work. I don’t give enough positive comments and that I take off for stupid things like getting facts wrong.
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26/29. My father is a professor, one time my brother and I were reading though his ratemyprofessor score together and one of the students called him “A BEAST”. We now call him that all the time because it’s hilarious.
In general, though, my father apparently isn’t an “easy A”, simply because you have to attend his lectures to pass, apparently his midterm was so hard, one girl cried. He really prefers working with grad students so he can connect more with them.
27/29. One of my professors has an evaluation that reads: “Knowledgeable, great, and funny. Drinks two bottles of Snapple per class. Thirst is his only weakness”
… It’s true.
28/29. My ratemyprofessor is something I go to whenever I’m having a rough day. Always makes me feel good. I have 6 hilarious tags. That’s right. Six.
29/29. Until this year, it was my custom to start each semester by projecting a slide of my worst reviews from the past semester and explaining my plan to address complaints in the coming semester.
Evaluations are anonymous but, this year, one student complained to the Dean of Science that her friends might recognize her distinctive sentence structure, thus violating confidentiality. This triggered an investigation by the chair of my department. He understood my reasoning and agreed that I had not acted with malice toward the student. Even so, it seems imprudent to quote any of my students in this public venue.
I had chosen reviews that reflected badly on me, not the students who wrote them. I also explained that I had deliberately posted the complaints verbatim so that nobody could accuse me of tampering with the results.