During pre-enrollment season, many students rely on Rate My Professor to craft their future schedules. Considering the cost and prestige of a Cornell education, some entitlement as to the quality of faculty is not unreasonable. Despite this, the ways in which students are able to interact with their future professors are fundamentally flawed, giving them a poor understanding of the true quality of many of the faculty.

Currently, for most, Rate My Professor is the obvious choice; it is easy to access and usually communicates essential information. Beyond this, many students believe it to be reliable: able to distinguish between professors that would be detrimental to their education from those that might help them flourish.

There is good precedent for this belief. Studies have been conducted showing a positive correlation between Rate My Professor feedback and university-administered evaluation forms. At face value, this seems like a perfectly reasonable argument for the accuracy of Rate My Professor, as official results appear to be reflected in unofficial evaluations.

However, Rate My Professor reviews barely differ in their form from course evaluations, as both ask for written opinions on course and professor performance. If one student were to have written an especially poor review on Rate My Professor, the natural inference is that they would do the same for Cornell’s official course evaluations. To this effect, it is not........

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