More than 10,000 GW undergraduates populate the blocks between Pennsylvania Avenue and E Street, sparking campus gossip to spread like wildfire. 

You may have only told a few friends about your gripes with a professor, but students’ aptitude for yapping accelerates the circulation of our opinions about one another. By the end of your four years at GW, you will undoubtedly collect impressions of countless campus figures — especially ones that influence your decision to add or drop a course this semester.

From GroupMe chats to hushed conversations outside of lecture halls, students voice their assessments of faculty both on-and-offline. But there is one platform that reigns supreme in its ability to showcase some of students’ most brutally honest opinions about their professors: Rate My Professors.

The faculty review site first launched in 1999 under the name TeacherRatings before solidifying itself as Rate My Professors in 2001. Rate My Professors has garnered about 20 million ratings since its launch, averages about 9 million viewers per month and rakes in about $3.4 million in revenue every year. Students who sign up for the site can rate their professors’ “overall quality” and “level of difficulty” on a scale from 1-5 and report whether they would take a class with them again. 

The site may be a friend for students, but for faculty, it can be a foe. GW professors said the website often draws polarized opinions that do not accurately reflect their teaching abilities, making the site an unproductive resource for feedback and an ineffective tool for students building their course schedules. 

Paul Carrillo, a professor of economics and international affairs, said he checks his reviews on Rate My Professors about once an academic year, but he takes them all with a “grain of salt.” He said he places more emphasis on GW’s official Student Feedback system — which allows students to write evaluations for their courses every semester — and feedback from his colleagues in the economics department. 

“The people who self-select to give an opinion about your performance in Rate My Professor are people who have very strong opinions about you,” Carrillo said. “Either those who really, really like your course, or those who really struggle then just don’t like your course.”

Carrillo said he compares Rate My Professors to the restaurant review website Yelp because both platforms require users to create an account, leave their ratings and write their reviews. He said the effort and time required to use these websites often draws stronger opinions than those of an average student.

“Because there is this compliance cost, because it’s costly to submit that review, you have to have a somewhat strong opinion to be willing to take that extra step and leave the review,” Carrillo said. 

Since joining GW in 2006, Carrillo said he has worked to incorporate feedback from his official GW course evaluations, which students complete at the end of every semester, into his teaching — from grading students’ midterm exams faster to reviewing calculus concepts. 

“Professors, we care a lot about our performance,” Carrillo said. “We want to convey knowledge to students. We want our students to learn. And it’s very hard to really assess how to become a better professor. So we do pay attention to students’ evaluations at the end of the semester.”

Carrillo said Rate My Professors’ decision to ditch their “hotness” metric in 2018 was a positive change that made the website more appropriate and professional. The website’s removal of the rating, which was represented by a chili pepper icon, followed a social media campaign led by thousands of faculty members and students. 

“That’s a good change, for example, because the more objective, the more professional it stays, I think it’s going to work best,” Carrillo said.

Daniel Mackay, an assistant professor of economics, said he used to check his Rate My Professors profile more often as he was beginning his career as a professor but now doesn’t frequent the website as he’s moved further into his tenure. 

“When I was first starting out, I used to check,” Mackay said. “I was very self conscious, right? Am I doing a good job?”

In the age of social media, Mackay said Rate My Professors allows students to engage with an anonymous online forum and discern for themselves what is accurate and inaccurate. He said some reviews can demonstrate a professor’s teaching skill but others may represent a student’s “axe to grind” with a particular faculty member.

“It serves a real, valuable purpose to freshmen, especially freshmen, to young adults, that what you read online is not always true,” Mackay said. “And if you carefully look at it, you can often discern what isn’t true.”

Mackay said he is not sure how helpful Rate My Professors is as a tool for forming schedules every semester because there are courses, like his class Principles of Economics I, that many students have to take to fulfill a requirement — regardless of who is teaching the course.

“Most of the people in the class are freshmen, don’t really have a choice,” Mackay said.”By the time you’re signing up, you’ve got this option or that option and you’re going to take the one you have to take. So I don’t know how helpful it might be with students actually making their schedules.”

Students said they routinely use Rate My Professors to create their course schedules every academic year, but the reviews on the site can vary in accuracy and don’t always make or break their decisions to take a course.

Sophomore Samuel Beltran, who is majoring in international affairs, said Rate My Professors reviews “significantly” impact his decisions on what courses to take, but students should be conscious of how they use the site because some reviews may be out of date and no longer reflect how the professor teaches today.

“Some of the reviews are sometimes very old, so they don’t reflect what the professor is like now because that was 10 or 15 years ago or what class they’re teaching,” Beltran said. “But outside of that, I feel like it’s pretty accurate.”

Eva Trotter, a sophomore majoring in marketing and English, said she usually looks for professors with scores of 3 or above on Rate My Professors, but she places more emphasis on finding classes that fit well in her schedule and fulfill her major requirements. 

“I would say it’s one of the top three priorities, because a professor can really make or break a class,” Trotter said.

Trotter said Rate My Professors draws divisive reviews that often skew professors’ ratings one way or another. She said she’s routinely used the website, but she’s never left a review for any professor herself.

“I’ve never had enough vengeance or admiration, I think, to leave one,” Trotter said.