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OSU faculty ranks high overall on RateMyProfessor.com
Website which ranks professors based on anonymous comments by students lists OSU as 44th in its top 50
Gail Cole
Issue date: 11/18/08 Section: News
A popular website that allows students to access information about future professors and vent frustrations about current classroom situations has given OSU high marks.
A recent ranking of national universities by RateMyProfessor.com listed OSU as number 44 in the top 50 in the nation, based on the faculty ratings by the website's users.
RateMyProfessor.com is an online forum where students can anonymously voice their opinions about professors. Over 6,000 schools are found on the website.
Students can rate professors on a number of things, including difficulty, helpfulness, clarity and textbook use. These ratings are grouped into "good," "average," and "poor" quality per user.
According to RateMyProfessor.com, schools had to have at least 30 rated professors to be considered for this list, and the ratings were averaged and ranked based on these averages.
Though OSU made it into the top 50 schools, no single OSU faculty member is found on the list of the 50 highest rated professors.
The top five universities on this list are Brigham Young University, Southeastern Louisiana University, Christopher Newport University, Stephen F. Austin State University and University of Houston.
The top five national universities on U.S. News' most recent list found on usnews.com are Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, and these were not found on RateMyProfessor.com's list.
Though this list is informal, many schools require faculty to be periodically reviewed in order to enhance teaching.
At OSU, faculty are subject to regular review where student evaluations are taken into consideration.
"There's a mandate … to use the student evaluation of teaching results," said Becky Johnson, vice provost of Academic Affairs. "Those have to be there for all classes [to be] taught by a faculty member."
Faculty who have difficulty teaching have several resources to help improve, according to Johnson, including the Center for Teaching and Learning.
A recent ranking of national universities by RateMyProfessor.com listed OSU as number 44 in the top 50 in the nation, based on the faculty ratings by the website's users.
RateMyProfessor.com is an online forum where students can anonymously voice their opinions about professors. Over 6,000 schools are found on the website.
Students can rate professors on a number of things, including difficulty, helpfulness, clarity and textbook use. These ratings are grouped into "good," "average," and "poor" quality per user.
According to RateMyProfessor.com, schools had to have at least 30 rated professors to be considered for this list, and the ratings were averaged and ranked based on these averages.
Though OSU made it into the top 50 schools, no single OSU faculty member is found on the list of the 50 highest rated professors.
The top five universities on this list are Brigham Young University, Southeastern Louisiana University, Christopher Newport University, Stephen F. Austin State University and University of Houston.
The top five national universities on U.S. News' most recent list found on usnews.com are Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, and these were not found on RateMyProfessor.com's list.
Though this list is informal, many schools require faculty to be periodically reviewed in order to enhance teaching.
At OSU, faculty are subject to regular review where student evaluations are taken into consideration.
"There's a mandate … to use the student evaluation of teaching results," said Becky Johnson, vice provost of Academic Affairs. "Those have to be there for all classes [to be] taught by a faculty member."
Faculty who have difficulty teaching have several resources to help improve, according to Johnson, including the Center for Teaching and Learning.
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