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Comment by RobGR | Hacker News Reader

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 ?

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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.

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