If you’re anything like me, you probably spent more time than you’d care to admit looking at Rate My Professor reviews during class registration week. But I want you to close your eyes for a second and imagine something. Imagine a world where you had all the information you could ever want about your classes at the touch of a button. Where the only thing that stood between you and a perfect schedule was your late registration time. Doesn’t that just sound a lot better than what you’re doing now?
Professors at the Claremont Colleges have a massive impact on the classes you take, with control over the syllabi, the classroom environment, the grading policies and the curve. And because we have such a lovely, diverse group of professors, all these elements vary widely from class to class. All this is to say, which professor you have is probably the biggest determinant of what the class is like learning-wise, work-wise and grade-wise.
Arguably, this is a problem — it makes totalizing statistics like the all-important GPA feel somewhat meaningless, since they contain no information about which professors you took or their grading scale. But I’d be okay with it if it weren’t so damn hard to get information on how professors teach and grade.
Of course, different colleges handle this problem differently. At Claremont McKenna College, all students are required to fill out a review of their professor in each class within a dedicated class time. And this information is, technically, publicly available. But you have to make a request for each individual class and professor, making the process of learning anything about your potential classes unbearably slow — so slow that nearly nobody uses it.
This isn’t even to mention what I see as the biggest problem with CMC’s review system — the whole process is done in the final meeting of class, before the final exams and before receiving final grades. In many of our classes, the final exam is a huge part of our grades and not including it in the review system inevitably misses a massive part of the experience.
That leaves us with two options: Rate My Professor and word of mouth. Rate My Professor has a couple problems. There is no incentive for leaving a review, so many professors — especially here where our class sizes are so small — have very few reviews. This incentive also means that people only write reviews when they feel particularly inclined to, so most reviews are overwhelmingly positive or negative, making it hard to get a grasp on what the average experience is like with a professor.
Word of mouth can be a lot better — if you’re someone with a lot of friends who have taken classes from every professor at the 5Cs, then your intel is one text message away. But, of course, most people don’t have access to this information — and even those that do could only get their friends’ opinions on what a class is like.
I’ll note here that other colleges have done this better than CMC. As much as I hate to use Pomona College as an example, their system is a much more transparent and useful way to do reviews. They essentially have an entire built-in, Rate My Professor-esque system on their student government website, where students are incentivized with gift card raffles and other rewards to write anonymous reviews of their classes and professors that are open to all other Pomona students to see. Pomona also has an entirely separate second system of reviews that works basically the same way as CMC’s does.
So should we all just do whatever Pomona does? Of course not … we don’t want to be stuck with mediocre dining halls, abysmal school colors and a clock tower that can’t even strike on the hour. But there are some things to be learned from how they conduct this process.
So, here’s my ideal system of professor reviews at the 5Cs. The professor review process has two parts: collecting the reviews from students plus aggregating and displaying them in a useful way.
Let’s start with review collection. Pomona and CMC both have a pretty good system here — CMC only system and Pomona’s second system, with its dedicated class time, probably gathers more reviews, but does so at the cost of 20 minutes of class or so. We could easily fix that problem by making reviews mandatory and something you complete after the semester ends. Pomona’s ASPC displays its reviews in a much more accessible and useful way.
Next, the aggregation. Both Rate My Professor and Pomona’s ASPC system have pretty good takes on this. Some information is compiled into averages, like the average rating out of five stars, the average difficulty out of five stars and the amount of time per week spent on classwork. But there’s a lot more information we could get here, right? CMC’s professor review survey asks many more questions, like how good specific parts of class are, what the professor most needs to improve at and a piece of advice you’d give to future students. This sort of material would also be useful to have, and it’s not guaranteed that you’ll get it unless someone does an exceptionally thorough Rate My Professor review. And even then, you won’t have aggregate data, just a bunch of paragraph summaries that are hard to parse.
The bottom line here is that who you have as your professor matters a ton, and our current professor review process makes it really hard to learn much about how professors teach or grade before you take them. A world in which we all had access to the information that we already collect about professors would be an obviously better one, and it’s one the colleges should implement as soon as possible.
Rowan Gray CM ’26 is from Sharon, Massachusetts. He wants you to know that all Oxford commas in this piece were violently deleted by his copy editors.
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