Some people will tell you that life is better thanks to online review sites that aggregate “the wisdom of the crowd” on everything from movies to hotels to restaurants, and they may have a point. Looking for a terrific Thai restaurant in Tampa? Zagat or Yelp have got you covered. How about an affordable hotel in Houston? TripAdvisor.com is there for you. But what if you’re a college student looking for a fun, easy-to-understand physics professor at Penn State? Thanks to RateMyProfessors.com you can now find that too.

RateMyProfessors.com is a controversial website that gives students the opportunity to flip roles and grade their professors on a 5 point scale based on Average Easiness, Average Helpfulness, and Average Clarity. These elements factor into the Overall Quality rating, which is the average of the scores. Adding a little fun at the expense of the RMP’s credibility, students can also rate their professors’ physical appearance, yielding a Hotness total. Though an attractive professor earns a chili pepper icon, this rating does not affect the Overall Quality rating. Students can also add tips for succeeding in a course, something that is arguably helpful for an incoming student who wants to know what to expect.

Over 9 million students use RMP to pick their next professor or to rate one they've had experience with. Instead of trying to find friends or classmates who’ve spent a semester with a particular instuctor, students can use RMP to find information in less time than it takes to actually enroll in the course. Currently RMP has 10 million ratings on over one million professors in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Owned by the MTV Network, famous for music videos and content targeted at college-age consumers, RMP has been in operation since 1999. It’s popularity, however, has skyrocketed as more students using social networking applications like Facebook tell their friends about the site.

To get a good feel for how it works, let’s take a look at how a real student, frustrated with her math professor, used RMP to self-validate her concerns. Play the video below.

What’s interesting about this video (with over 19,000 YouTube views as of today) is the emotion you can sense from an obviously frustrated and perhaps even math-phobic student. But you also have to consider the instructor’s perspective. After all, it can’t be easy teaching general education math courses to students who may not want to be there in the first place. Let’s just say it’s not a formula for high ratings.

To be sure, there are many critics of RMP, especially among those professors who are getting hit the hardest with low ratings. While some students leave thoughtful posts that professors can use as a means of constructive criticism, others use the site as a convenient vehicle for venting frustrations with a given professor. It’s no surprise that most ratings are posted during midterms and after final semester grades are posted. It also appears, from a review of the site, that most students who post comments write them from extreme experiences, whether positive or negative.

RMP recently added a feature where professors can defend themselves and their pedagogical tactics. Each professor's page also includes a link that reads "Professors add your rebuttal here” where they can add their own comments to the ratings. Some professors have even added video comments, taking full advantage of a social media application that helps them personalize and energize their response. Let’s take a quick look at one such response.

Educators also cast doubt on the validity of ratings for extremely popular professors. Furthermore, RMP doesn’t have anything in place that requires students to have actually taken a class from a professor to rate them, so an individual in California who isn’t even a student could rate a professor in New York. Critics also worry that the majority of students using the site are upset about their grades, so they are more critical of the professor who issued it.

Yet RMP might be more accurate than most might think. A study conducted by Theodore Coladarci and Irv Komfield, at the University of Maine, found that the ratings on RMP are significantly correlated with the formal student evaluations traditionally conducted by the college or university at the end of the semester. Coladarci is quick to point out, however, that the correlations aren’t universally high, noting that instructors who get high ratings on RMP also tend to get high ratings from their own institution’s evaluation system. Instructors with lower RMP ratings don’t necessarily have high correlations.

As a result of their research, Coladarci and Komfield suggest that professors put their official student evaluations online or that colleges create their own rating systems using similar technology to aggregate student feedback, a controversial recommendation itself. That said, some schools are already doing this.

Northwestern University has such a site for their students. In order to have accurate data with several evaluations, the university requires students to fill out evaluations for courses they have already completed before they can view the evaluations of their prospective professors. The result? Student evaluations increased by 80%, suggesting that the incentive to view evaluations while picking a professor could actually help improve the number of evaluations gathered by a university.

Some critics of publicizing student evaluations worry that negative comments, which have a longer half-life than positive ones, could damage a professor’s image, perhaps even a career. However, some observers think it may be beneficial for all parties to have the institutions themselves publish student evaluations. The anonymous founder of RateYourStudents.com, a blog created as a reaction to RMP, states that “publicizing professors who weren't meeting student expectations would encourage professors to try and address their weaknesses.”

Whether professors choose to publish their official evaluations online or not, RateMyProfessors.com won’t be going away anytime soon. Its momentum is worth noting. So is the evolving world of collaborative online ratings. If you can buy it, sell it, serve it, or consume it—it can be rated by your customers and prospective customers and then shared with anyone who wants to see it.

RateMyProfessors.com has demonstrated that even the life of the venerable college professor, the proverbial “sage on the stage,” is subject to the good, the bad, and the ugly of a disruptive technology in the social media ecosystem.

Contributor to this post: Haley Birkeland