Getting to Know Your Teachers Personally

ratemyteachers.com logo

Since the beginning of time, students have been the ones tormented by an F on their test, worried about what punishment Mom or Dad will give them when they come home. Who would have thought that teachers would be forced to cope with grades of their own, not given by their bosses, but by students?

Ratemyteachers.com is a database of teacher reviews consisting of over 11 million junior high and high school teachers across the nation. The site gained popularity due to students’ curiosity about the quality of potential elective teachers. In other cases, students looked up teachers on new schedules right before school starts.

“I think it could give students an idea of how their teacher is [going] to be,” junior Denisa Linte said. “I mean, we’re graded; why shouldn’t teachers get graded?”

Teachers are graded on clarity, helpfulness, popularity and easiness. A rating of 1 through 5 is given for each of these categories, and the average of the scores becomes the overall score for the teacher. Whether or not these categories correctly describe a teacher’s skill is up for debate.

“I guess [easiness is] unfair,” Linte said. “A teacher can be really good and help you learn a lot but that doesn’t mean that they’re easy. They’re most likely hard, but if they help you learn a lot, then that doesn’t mean that they’re a bad teacher.”

Popularity is another controversial rating because popularity amongst students does not necessarily reflect a teacher’s instructional ability.

“Popularity doesn’t really make sense,” junior Fadi Mohammad said. “It’s honestly how good the teacher is.”

While the easiness ratings and popularity ratings might not be the best indication of a good teacher, malicious comments on teachers, something ratemyteaachers.com is notorious for hosting, are even worse. Although cursing is censored, any other hateful language can be used.

“Some of the people just go on and try to troll,” Mohammad said.

Troll, according to urbandictionary.com, is internet slang for when someone posts a deliberately provocative message online.

Many people do indeed post reviews about teachers that say nothing useful. This can range from a negative comment that just says “doesn’t talk to everyone,” or a positive one that says “good rugby coach.” These comments are for English teacher Michael Murphy, who has generally good reviews overall.

“I don’t think it really has any effect on teachers,” Murphy said. “During my 12 years of teaching here, I’ve only heard about it twice.”          

Without any bad reviews directed towards them, teachers generally will not have much personal reason to feel badly about the site.

“Should it exist?” Murphy said. “Sure, why not? It has the right to exist. It can have positives. It lets feelings out.”

What about teachers with bad reviews? Spanish teacher Timothy Brown has an easiness grade of 2.7, a helpfulness grade of 2.5, a clarity grade of 2.3, and a popularity grade of 2.

One comment read, “My kid complains that he can’t even speak english so no one understands him and he has not one bit of control in the class. Who the hell hired this guy it is shameful.”

 “I really don’t go by [the reviews] because I know what I do in my class is productive,” Brown said. “There’s nothing detailed in there.”

Although Brown said he doesn’t “go by” the reviews, he admitted that the comments bothered him.

“I think it bothers anybody,” Brown said.  “If you have an excellent student and he’s the one that puts a bad comment on there, then there could be some validity to it.”

Since its genesis, ratemyteachers.com opened the door for adults, parents and even colleagues to make reviews about teachers. Although reviews are supposed to be made by only students and teachers, colleagues and other adults can scrutinize teachers as well.

“I was targeted by people other than my student,” science teacher Latha Shankar said. “That person found [ratemyteachers.com] and opened access to talking about me even though he was an adult and that was very wrong. And it was not even related to me being a teacher.”

Shankar also noted that she feared the access issues on the site. With internet security advancing everyday, there are ways to track people on websites. Anything posted on the web stays there forever.

“Every user has to be responsible for what they write and [ratemyteachers.com] should be held by the same accountability of other social media,” Shankar said.

Bill Rowley, Chantilly’s security officer, made no mention of any consequences pertaining to ratemmyteachers.com. For now, it seems that teachers will just have to sit and endure the criticisms.

ratemyteachers, reviews, teachers Features, Issue 1, Print