“Assignments will be due without prior mention, and she critiques not only your work but also your personal ethics.”

“She makes you feel stupid and worthless. I cried when I left the class and never went back.”

“He is impossible to follow. He is obviously a genius in English but incapable of teaching.”

These are just a few comments posted alongside “ratings” of Butte College professors on RateMyProfessors.com.

The site allows students to rate their professors on clarity, easiness, helpfulness and overall quality, as well as their “hotness.” Comments can also be posted along with the ratings on each professor’s individual profile.

According to the site, “RateMyProfessors.com is the Internet’s largest listing of collegiate professor ratings, with more than 6.8 million student-generated ratings of over 1 million professors.”

The 6,000 schools are not restricted to the United States alone. Reviews also come in from Canada, England, Scotland and Wales.

The site was developed by John Swapceinski after having a bad experience with a professor while he was attending San Jose University.

According to Wired.com, Swapceinski sold RateMyProfessors to Patrick Nagle, president and CEO of SwitchTextbooks.com in 2005. The site was sold in 2007 to MTVU, MTV’s online platform.

The website is relatively easy to utilize. Students can either use the site’s search engine to find a professor by name or else search by college to find an entire listing of registered faculty. Once the school is located, students can search by academic department. By clicking on the professor of their choice, a profile will appear with that professor’s ratings and comments.

Each professor’s “scorecard” is categorized by the number of ratings, the average score (1-5) of overall quality, easiness, clarity, helpfulness and “hotness” value (the number of times students have deemed them “hot,” which causes a chili pepper icon to appear).

Students use this website as a scheduling tool. Before registering for classes in a specific department, they survey the staff members. The comments aren’t always derogatory and often mention the professor’s teaching style, amount of homework given, amount of expected outside time, speaking style, etc. This site may be deemed helpful by students who need a compatible teacher to their specific academic needs.

Butte College student Stephanie Santolo said she discovered RateMyProfessors through a friend of hers who had already graduated.

“I would look up my classes on Webadvisor,” she said, “then read the comments on RateMyProfessors to choose the instructor.”

Santolo said she normally doesn’t rate her professors after taking a class, but she uses it before she registers for classes in order to make sure she gets “good professors.”

However, Santolo said she thinks she will rate one of her professors this semester.

“She is just so hypocritical. I mean, I like the class. But she makes it difficult because she is constantly contradicting herself… [I] know that in the future I will probably only rate professors I don’t like versus ones I do.”

Professor Dennis Hyde, who scored exceptionally high with eight ratings of 5.0, said that he was not fazed by the existence of RateMyProfessors, due to the fact he’s only visited the site twice.

“I think it’s a reasonable thing to do,” he said, referring to rating professors. “[The students] feel freer doing it on their own time, in their own homes.”

According to The Guardian Online, RateMyProfessors receive several threats of libel suits weekly (with no actual suits filed). Extremely derogatory comments could be hazardous to a staff member’s reputation and, thus, decrease the number of students registering for their classes.

When asked whether Hyde was worried about potentially libelous statements being posted about himself and other teachers he said, “It never occurred to me that people would be so mean-spirited. I can understand them discussing my homework load or how I organize my lectures… but slander? That’s something else.”

He also pointed out that he didn’t feel that the comments on RateMyProfessors would affect his class size.

“You have to remember, we get written evaluations from students every semester at Butte… [S]o we get judged anyway.”

The website does safeguard against especially heinous or abusive comments by offering a “report this comment” icon, indicated by a red “!,” allowing a professor, student or other website visitor to alert the webmaster.

RateMyProfessors has 538 professors from Butte College alone.

Using a “filter” option, we were able to adjust the list to see the top scoring professors for Butte College in each category.

Bob Suchill of the Economics Department had the most ratings overall with 76 individual ratings. Suchill passed away one year ago.

Sanjay Dev from the Mathematics Department was rated the “hottest” professor with 59 percent of his rating students deeming him as “Hot.”

Due to the fact that the website was not designed to pit professors against each other in a competitive ranking format, distinguishing “top scoring” professors was difficult.

Taking into consideration the number of ratings per professor was necessary to attempt a more accurate and comprehensive list. Thus, we compiled our list based on professors who had received 20 ratings or above. The score is from a 1 to 5 scale based on overall quality.

Note: The following list is not a representation of The Roadrunner staff but merely the results collected from RateMyProfessors.com.

Top 5
Dev, Sanjay-53 ratings of 4.9
Yeager, Melody-25 ratings of 4.9
Mckinnon, Mark-70 ratings of 4.8
Sincoff, Steve-26 ratings of 4.8
Hauser, Juliet-27 ratings of 4.7

Bottom 5
Burgan Louise-30 ratings of 1.6
Adame, Leonard-46 ratings of 1.8
Wu, Wei-Ming-59 ratings of 2.3
Hoiland, Scott-28 ratings of 2.3
Woods, Mike-26 ratings of 2.6