Grading the graders: How Rate My Professors reflects bias in gender and race

When Clarissa Griffin, ArtSci ’26, builds her course schedule, she always checks Rate My Professors.

While the website has never stopped her from taking a class, she likes to see what other students have said about her professors before the semester begins. Griffin mostly looks at the overall “score” a professor receives, finding it a useful—if imperfect—summary of their teaching. Still, she notices that the reviews tend to be polarized: students either love a professor or can’t stand them.

Founded in ’99, Rate My Professors lets students anonymously review their instructors’ teaching style, course difficulty, and overall experience. According to the site’s social media, it now hosts over 19 million student comments and ratings for 1.7 million professors across 7,500 schools in North America. At Queen’s, many students, like Griffin, turn to it for insight—whether to find the best lecturers or to brace themselves for a challenge.

Griffin explains that while she often checks the site before enrolling in a class, the reviews themselves tend to lack nuance. “I find that the specific comments are usually whether the problem is people only leave a review if they love it or they hate it,” Griffin said in an interview with The Journal. “There’s no in between.”

While she understands that professor’s ratings can often be polarizing, she finds that often, when professors have very poor ratings, the ratings tend to be accurate. Griffin said that she has rarely had a peer say that they will not take a class due to a professor’s overall score and that, in her experience, students use the website to gauge the personality and preferences of their professors.

When posting a review, students rate their professor from one to five for teaching quality and difficulty, note whether they’d take another class with them, and leave a required comment on teaching style and communication. They can also answer optional questions—like attendance or textbook use—and add up to three tags such as “tough grader” or “amazing lectures.” Reviews using profanity, derogatory language, or alleging bias may be removed.

Since its launch, copycat sites like Rate My Courses or Rate My Teacher have tried to carve out space online—but none have matched Rate My Professors’ reach or influence, in terms of online traffic.

The main issue that Griffin sees with the Rate My Professors website is biases such as gender, race and especially accents show up in reviews.

“Everyone loves to complain about the professors with strong accents,” Griffin said. “A lot of people complain that [they] couldn’t understand a word they said.”

Professor in the department of Chemistry at Queen’s Jean-Michel Nunzi said in a statement to The Journal that he has experience this bias firsthand with several students explicitly complaining about his French accent rather than providing him with constructive feedback.

According to Nunzi, students who are willing to learn something during their time at Queen’s would likely opt to ignore platforms such as Rate My Professors.

Echoing that sentiment, English professor Scott-Morgan Straker said the site reflects deeper issues, pointing to systemic biases in student evaluations, where gender, race, and accents can influence ratings. He added that research on Rate My Professors shows these biases run deeper than they appear, shaped by systemic barriers that affect how students perceive women and faculty of colour.

“There’s that perceived cultural barrier, and that gets reflected in surveys,” Straker said. “So, surveys are really, really problematic in that way [and] they really reflect systemic biases.”

The 2015 study “She does have an accent but…”: Race and language ideology in students’ evaluations of mathematics instructors on RateMyProfessors.com published by the Cambridge University Press found that professors with non-native English accents—particularly Asian instructors—were more likely to face student complaints on Rate My Professors. Straker said this kind of bias contributes to one of his main concerns with the site: how polarized its ratings tend to be.

“I find that it’s mostly people who are really motivated one way or the other to do it,” Straker said. “Either they really, really love the class and they want to say so, or they really, really hated the class so there [isn’t] a great deal in the middle.”

Even though Straker sees these issues as significant drawbacks for the platform, he believes that one positive is that it gives students some power to stand up against the power dynamic between professors and students by leaving critical comments.

“You can rate your professors anonymously [and] this evens the playing field, because even in a university anonymous course evaluation, you’re doing it in the classroom, there’s a power dynamic,” Straker said. “This is a way of giving students the upper hand, and actually a good thing.”

According to Straker, the administration doesn’t consider Rate My Professors in promotion decisions, relying instead on internal surveys such as the Queen’s Survey of Student Experience of Teaching (QSSET). In an e-mail statement to The Journal, Queen’s confirmed they don’t rely on Rate My Professor for evaluation, stating that they use (QSSET) to gather student feedback—though unlike Rate My Professors, those results aren’t publicly available.

“[QSSET’s] purpose is improvement—not course selection,” Queen’s wrote. “Some instructors may also use additional surveys or feedback tools for their own teaching.”

Kieryn Breslow-Bardell, ConEd ‘27, said that although he’s never posted a review himself, he often checks the site when choosing courses—alongside the syllabus, degree requirements, and advice from peers.

“[Rate My Professors] can highlight real strengths or issues, but it’s not a full picture and can reflect bias,” Breslow-Bardell wrote in an e-mail statement to The Journal.  “When many recent comments independently describe the same points, it’s usually a reliable signal [that the reviews are more likely to be accurate].”

Breslow-Bardell said he pays most attention to reviews that give professors around a 3.0 rating, finding them more balanced than the extremes. Comments with perfect scores often lack detail, he explained, while 1.0 or 2.0 ratings can stem from poor grades or personal bias. “[Three ratings] are often written by students who enjoyed the course as an elective but weren’t looking for a major challenge, so they tend to balance pros and cons,” Breslow-Bardell said.

He also uses the site to find courses that match his preferences—like group projects instead of timed exams. “I look for the most recent terms first and look for patterns about workload, clarity of expectations, and how well tests match lectures,” he said. “If comments describe clear rubrics, timely feedback, and responsive communication, I am more likely to choose that [course].”

On the other side of the platform, professors tend to approach the site with more caution. Graeme W. Howe, a professor in the Department of Chemistry, explains he generally avoids his Rate My Professors page, worrying that the small number of reviews limits how constructive the feedback can be.

“[I] assumed that the site would largely be host to a popularity contest, and I have no idea how I’d fare in one of those,” Howe wrote in an e-mail statement to The Journal.

Instead, Howe stated that there are some comments with constructive feedback. “I see that comments are somewhat consistently saying that I’m not very organized and that I need to stop cancelling office hours without notice,” Howe said. “Now, I know, and I’ll try to correct those behaviours.”

While he sees several constructive comments, Howe feels that it would be beneficial for students to give their feedback to professors before the conclusion of the course.

“As far as I can tell from discussions with my colleagues, most of us would love to get feedback before the class ends, so that we have a chance to address comments and improve our teaching,” Howe said. “I could be mistaken, but as far as I can tell, we professors aren’t regularly checking our [Rate My Professors] pages for feedback, but if you tell us what you think, then we can change what we’re doing!”

Howe said he prefers the QSSET format over Rate My Professors because it’s standardized and gathers feedback from the entire class, rather than a small, self-selecting group of students.

The University added that students have access to other reliable tools for course planning—such as the Academic Calendar, SOLUS timetable, and departmental advising—which offer accurate information about course content, structure, and requirements.

Still, despite these official resources, according to Howe, many students continue to rely on Rate My Professors when choosing their courses. Howe said several students have even told him they avoided certain classes based on a professor’s online rating. He also echoed Griffin’s concerns about bias in student evaluations—whether explicit or implicit—and how it can distort perceptions of teaching quality.

“If you go by the scores on [Rate my Professor], it seems like several colleagues in my department, who I know to be excellent instructors, are at a disadvantage by virtue of their gender, race, or accent,” Howe said.

While Rate My Professors remains a popular, convenient tool for students, Griffin notes it is also rife with bias and negativity. For some, like Griffin, the site offers a glimpse of what to expect on the first day of class; for others, it can reinforce and amplify the biases and critical attitudes already present within the academic community.

The Journal contacted Rate My Professors to obtain the company’s perspective on how students and professors engage with the website, but didn’t receive a response in time for publication.

Tags

QSSET, rate my professors, ratings

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