by Sean Poliakoff

Created on: November 22, 2008   Last Updated: January 30, 2009

Hannah Sanders is a 17-year-old nursing major at Florida Community College at Jacksonville (FCCJ) and she is like most students. She doesn't know much about the FCCJ professors. She doesn't know which professors are going to work one-on-one with her and which professors are going to expect her to teach herself all of the work with no instructional help. Most students don't know which professors will make or break their GPA.

RateMyProfessor.com, an online database that allows students to grade professors, gives students the ability to browse through school professors by name or subject matter.

According to the website, more than 6,000 schools and one million professors are registered in the database. Students can read what fellow students have written about their classes and professors. The student can then determine whether he or she wants to register for the course.

RateMyProfessor.com uses four ratings on a 5.0 scale - helpfulness, clarity, rater interest, and ease to grade each of the professors. In addition, an overall rating combines the helpfulness and clarity ratings.

Some students try to make sure that their GPA is secure by using RateMyProfessor.com to find the best, easiest, or most educational professors on campus.

Some students, like Sanders, who are preparing their transcripts for a transfer to a larger university, wants to make sure that their GPA and the classes that they selected will fit in with their desired school choice.

Benjamin Appelo, a 17-year-old biology major at FCCJ, said that he checks RateMyProfessor.com several times before each semester and the ratings on the website heavily sway his decision for choosing a course. In addition, he said that he has never enrolled in a course without checking RateMyProfessor.com first.

Some students are very appreciative of the service and claim that RateMyProfessor.com is usually accurate.

Elizabeth Hope Potter, an 18-year-old vocal performance major, said that she has used RateMyProfessor.com every time that she has planned her schedule and the ratings are usually anywhere from 80 percent to 100 percent accurate.

Sanders, similarly, said that RateMyProfessor.com has been accurate with her other than one significant exception. Sanders says that during her freshman year she took a science teacher who had received high ratings. However, her experience with the teacher was much worse than the ratings had indicated.

Some professors at FCCJ are also very appreciative of RateMyProfessor.com.

Robert Blade, who teaches

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