Ask HN: RateMyProfessors replacement? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: RateMyProfessors replacement?

5 pointsjobeirne12 comments

I think it's about time this shoddy site gets replaced. 350 character cap on comments and silly criteria like hot-or-not doesn't make sense when you're deciding how to spend (literally) thousands of dollars. The website is ugly as sin and bears load horribly to boot.

I envision a much cleaner site where comment length is uninhibited and users actually need to log in with a school e-mail to post comments. I'd also like users to be able to reply to each others' comments.

I'm seriously considering going after this. So, Hacker News, you think it's worthwhile?

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Without anonymity, will people post ? If they have to use a school email to post, will they be anonymous ? If you send an "account confirmation" email to the student's address, won't some idiot at the institution read it and try to use it to deduce who is giving certain reviews ?

Maybe one way to get an edge and get started, is to also allow rating of a lot of other stuff besides professors. Rate administrations, lab conditions, dorms, frats, etc. You could even have a way for Professors to rate their students, and for students to rate students.

Maybe to keep it at least slightly positive, make it so there is some kind of reward for posting positive reviews ?

Great questions, thanks. Ideally, I'd allow the student to choose whether or not they'd like to remain anonymous, but all accounts would initiate to an anonymous state.

Another reason I'd be doing the e-mail verification thing is so professors can't rate themselves highly, which I've heard is rampant on RateMyProfessors.

My school does not supply a school email address. I also remember an article posted here a couple months ago that described Boston College not going to supply students with email addresses any longer. Their reason cited is that students have an online identity prior to college. Perhaps more and more schools will follow the same path.

My point is that requiring a .edu address is artificially restricting your potential, and most certainly legitimate, users.

I read RateMyProfessors and the information given is less detailed than the information I get talking to people in the halls of my school. The site definitely has a use, but a professor rating himself artificially high will probably contradict the actual widely held student view that the reader already knows.

Actually if I remember the Boston College change correctly, they weren't supplying students with email accounts, but were switching to an email forwarding service.

The idea is that an .edu address is important and necessary in more places than you think (and beyond the likes of facebook as well) and provides one way of verifying you are in some way affiliated with the .edu in question, but you don't have to check separate inboxes to do so. I know I haven't logged in to my .edu accounts in possibly years and just have them forwarded to my main email address. I can't imagine there aren't a lot of people out there doing the same.

I think this restriction is a valid one provided you have a provision for manually checking users that don't have such an email address (probably a small minority).

AFAIK, no Canadian schools provide .edu email addresses, this is definitely something to keep in mind.

Yeah, why not. As a student, the hotornot-like criteria is a big turn-off from me rating or reading ratings of teachers. Typically the teachers with high ratings are the easy markers, not necessarily the best professors. A lot of the ratings appear to be the result of personal grudges as well.

So yeah, there's lots of room for improvement here.

Seconded.

Lots of room for improvement that is hard to get, perhaps. I'm most likely to leave reviews for professors if they were either exceptionally good or bad, and I'm too lazy to leave one for a mediocre one (the vast majority) unless I was already motivated by an exceptional one. A change in websites wouldn't change much there.

I would be seriously interested in helping you take on this project. I have spent the last year and a half developing RateMyStudentRental.com for reviewing on- and off-campus rental housing and dorms.

We have developed solutions to many of the problems you're contemplating (school email confirmation, conditional anonymity, etc.), so I think there might be a good opportunity to collaborate here.

Just as we've developed a way to involve landlords and school administrators in the site without compromising the students' anonymity, I've thought of how much opportunity ratemyprofessors is missing out on. Their business model is horribly outdated, and there are so many other ways they could be leveraging their information. Imagine if the site partnered with education specialists to help the poorly-rated professors improve their lessons and teaching. And a comment I had often heard from my professors was that until the site gave them a chance to respond (much like we've done with landlords), they would never take it seriously.

Not to mention the fact that there'd be an excellent opportunity to partner with schools (much like our School Partnership Program) and allow them to incorporate the ratings and website into their online registration process (or offer them an online registration process entirely).

I could go on indefinitely, so I'll just stop here. You get the idea. Please let me know if you're interested and serious about pursuing this venture.

We need to talk. I have been working on a competitor to ratemyprofessor for the past few weeks and I am going to be launching it soon. Email me at the address in my profile.

I am one of the co-founders of Koofers.com (one of the LaunchBox08 portfolio companies) and we have a VERY in depth professor rating system.

Check out our page and video over at CrunchBase for more info: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/koofers-com

Feel free to E-mail me at michael@koofers.com with any of your thoughts, comments, or suggestions.

I think that this is an extremely difficult market to break in to, as any advantage your site provides would have to outweigh the large base of reviews that RateMyProfessors already has.

There are already several other sites attempting to do this, with varying levels of success. My school (Marquette University) is currently affiliated with PickAProf.com

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