Human Interaction with Technology and Information

Data Source Project: Rate My Professor.com

Hidehiko Udagawa

1. Description of data

According to Wikipedia, RateMyProfessor.com allows college and university students to anonymously assign ratings to professors of American, Canadian, British, New Zealand, and Australian institutions. The site contains more than six million ratings, for more than half a million professors. All ratings are supposed to be anonymous without any instructor input or decisions.

2. Why is it interesting?

· We all want to know how helpful a professor is before taking their class. This data helps us to pick classes. We also may post a rating and review of any professor already listed on the site, and may create a listing for any individual not already listed.

· The site is not only useful for our college; we could also search for the teacher in other places.

· It is interesting that we can rate the professor’s “appearance” as “hot” or “not”, and may include “comments”

3. How we can obtain data.

· Go to RateMyProfessor.comhttp://www.ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp

We can pick either from the professor’s name or the school name to search for the professor you are looking for.

Type the professor’s name or school name into the small box and click search. Lists of professors will appear. We could just scroll the bar to find the correct professor. Or we could find the professor by department. Pick the department where the professor works and lists of professors in the department will appear and we could click on the professor we are looking for. We could find the rating of the professor on a 1-5 scale in the following categories: “easiness”, “helpfulness”, “clarity”, and the rater’s “interest”

4. What specific questions the data will/can answer: The data can answer several questions, including:

· Although the information about professors is not accurate, we could get general personalities of the teachers.

· We could find the rating of the professor in the following categories: “easiness”, “helpfulness”, “clarity”, and the rater’s “interest”

· We might be able to find pictures of professors before taking classes.