

Ask HN: RateMyProfessors replacement? - jobeirne

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.<p>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.<p>I'm seriously considering going after this. So, Hacker News, you think it's worthwhile?
======
RobGR
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 ?

~~~
jobeirne
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.

~~~
micks56
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.

~~~
silencio
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).

------
paulgb
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.

~~~
silencio
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.

------
NoBSWebDesign
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.

------
rickharrison
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.

------
mrihani
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.

------
harpastum
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

