A Preliminary Experimental Analysis on RateMyProfessors

Byron J. Gao, Alexander Katrompas

Abstract: Online reviews have a critical impact on e-commerce business. While many studies have been done on the various characteristics of online reviews, in this paper we present a preliminary experimental analysis on RateMyProfessors, a well-known review site that allows college students to post reviews and assign ratings to professors. We collected online review data from RateMyProfessors and compared them with assumptive ground truth. Our analysis suggests an evaluation bias where RateMyProfessors ratings tend to be more negative. About 76% of professors in general and 90% of professors teaching hard courses are negatively affected.