Ratemyprofessors.com Rates Your University
Ratemyprofessors.com, a website on which students may anonymously leave comments on a given professor's relative strengths and weaknesses, has recently released a list of the fifty highest ranked colleges based on student assessments of each institution's respective faculty. "Selecting only schools with a minimum of at least 30 rated professors," the website informs us, they "computed the average professor rating for each school (only professors with 30 ratings or higher)" before they were "ranked from high to low according to their average rating."
Although the authority of the list is no doubt limited by its having been based upon the voluntarily offered rankings of individual instructors by students who have sought out the website (clearly, a student could submit multiple ratings for the same instructor and those that visit the website are not necessarily representative of a school's entire student body), it does provide us with some food for thought. For instance, schools most often ranked highest by US News & World Report, say, or the Princeton Review, are conspicuously absent from the Ratemyprofessors list (a single Ivy League institution -- Cornell University -- clings on to the last spot, for instance). One possible interpretation of this fact is that research-oriented universities tend to hire faculty less for their ability to teach then for their ability to produce journal articles or conduct research. The problem with such a scenario, of course, is that while students are drawn to certain institutions for the quality of education its reputation seems to promise, they are often met with indifferent or ineffectual scholars wholly uninterested in teaching. Naturally, this is but one possible way of interpreting a thoroughly unscientific body of data. . .
The rankings, as determined by the website's users (italics denote schools likely to appear very high in other rankings):
2. Southeastern Louisiana University
3. Christopher Newport University
4. Stephen F. Austin State University
5. University of Houston
6. Texas Christian University
7. Augusta State University
8. University of Central Oklahoma
9. College of William and Mary
10. Grove City College
11. James Madison University
12. Grand Valley State University
13. Florida International University
14. University of Texas at San Antonio
15. University of Virginia
16. Florida State University
17. Louisiana Tech University
18. Liberty University
19. University of North Florida
20. George Mason University
21. West Virginia University
22. University of Delaware
23. University of Central Florida
24. Utah Valley State College
25. University of Northern Iowa
26. York College of Pennsylvania
27. Marist College
28. College of Charleston
29. University of South Florida
30. Jacksonville State University
31. Oakland University
32. American University
33. San Francisco State University
34. Appalachian State University
35. Indiana University of Pennsylvania
36. Northeastern University
37. Radford University
38. Towson University
39. Bradley University
40. University of Tennessee at Martin
41. Virginia Commonwealth University
42. Old Dominion University
43. Nicholls State University
44. Oregon State University
45. Boston University
46. Northwest Missouri State University
47. University of Florida
48. Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
49. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
50. Cornell University
Among the "elite" schools missing from the list are Duke, Harvard, Brown, Penn, Dartmouth, Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Emory, University of California-Berkeley, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Chicago, Stanford, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Interesting.
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