Ruin My Week
11.
For some reason a few students came up with some inside joke that my dad (a sculpture professor) is obsessed with eating hard-boiled eggs during class. They all gave him 5 star reviews but wrote about his ‘weird obsession’. He thinks it’s hilarious and he says that new students still ask about it every year at the beginning of class
12.
My very first comment was: in all caps, “Don’t take her!! All she ever does is talk about witches and fairytales and then throws the assignment at you expecting you to know everything.”
For starters, it was one day. It was a genre-themed writing class and we did one day on the fairy tale genre discussing structure, themes, etc. They read the “The Snow Queen” and then they could do an optional extra credit assignment about Frozen.
This was posted on the day we discussed fairy tales and I also returned a major essay that day. A student threw a huge hissy fit in class over a B+ instead of an A. I pulled her aside and went through her paper with her explaining deductions. She apparently was still mad.
That was my only comment and rating for awhile.
13.
The funniest review was from an organ performance major.
He said that I was “the only instructor who could effectively teach organ technique and the performance of literature in the studio while simultaneously correcting a wrong note he heard coming from a piano major across the hall in a practice room!”
14.
I think I’ve mentioned this on here before but back when I was in my PhD program my friends and I used to troll each other all the time with fake reviews on RateMyProfessor. One of my friends wrote one about how I was great except how weird it was that I have a stripper pole in my kitchen. I wrote several for my friends, including one where I mentioned that he would give extra credit to anyone who asked him about his pet lobster.
As for the legitimate reviews, I only have one bad one and I’m about 99% positive it was written by the angry racist I had one semester who was furious at me for not respecting his opinion that Blacks and Muslims are destroying European culture. I also haven’t gotten a review on that site in years either (I don’t even have a listing under my current university), which had me wondering if students still use it as a resource until I saw this question.
Like any other site though, RateMyProfessor should be taken with a grain of salt. If the professor only has one review and it’s a negative one, it was probably written by a spiteful student (that was the case for one of my friends who failed a student for plagiarism – guess which student wrote the review) and it has not escaped my attention that women get rated much more harshly on that site than men do, especially if they’re young and attractive (side note: pretty much every single one of my female colleagues has been asked out by their students multiple times even if they were married or engaged and I have never heard a single one of them express the slightest gratitude for these advances). Talking to people who have taken classes with that professor before is a better approach than RateMyProfessor. You can get a much better sense of just what the professor is like that way.
15.
Not myself but my brother in law decided it would be funny to look up my uncle who was a university lecturer at the time. He found one student had left a review that said how he wished he was speeding on the way to class that day so he’d crash and not have to attend the lecture.
In all fairness, my uncle was a shit lecturer so that surprised none of us.
16.
I looked up my partner on RateMyProfessor. Someone wrote that he is so attractive it’s hard to pay attention.
I agree, random undergrad.
