Pipe Dream’s November 30th article “Faculty give Rate My Professors mixed reviews” perpetuated the myth of Rate My Professors being useless. RateMyProfessors.com, however, gives students an unparalleled ability to control their education. Instead crossing their fingers for a good professor, they can find one even if a trusted friend has never taken the professor’s class. I challenge any student who doubts the site’s usefulness to search it for a past professor. It is aggravatingly accurate. You will learn of all of the pain you could have avoided. In the 21st century world of big data, it is increasingly clear that preferences are not unique. There are other students who share the same values using Rate My Professors. Learn from their mistakes, so you do not have to make them yourself.

The most common criticism of Rate My Professors is students just use it for professor bashing. While there are students who professor-bash on the site, it does a good job at censoring many of those remarks. There are still offensive or inaccurate remarks, but Binghamton students are not stupid. We can tell the poorly written “I have bad grade and this why” comments from the genuine advice the site’s users offer. Additionally, the haters are mostly outnumbered by people offering solid advice. While, ideally, the haters would stop hating, it is impossible to silence them without also potentially censoring the valuable advice other students have.

The article’s method of silencing the haters is the University administered Student Opinion of Teaching surveys (SOOTs). SOOTs are like Rate My Professors as they elicit student opinion and are valuable for the professors. Unfortunately, for students, they have an unmentioned catch: they are primarily only seen by the professor they review and are not made public. Without this data, students are forced to pretend naively that all professors help their students equally. While most of the outstanding faculty here at Binghamton deserve nothing but praise, there are some that are incapable of teaching students in a fair and effective manner. Until these professors are removed, students must use every means available to avoid them in order to contrive the full value of their education.

Rate My Professors not only helps find the best professors; it also helps find the right professor for each student. Comments on the site reveal preferences of the professor that, while not necessarily bad, may not be shared by some students. Maybe a student who needs to work on his math wants to pick the professor who uses the most math. The site is also used for schedule balancing. If a student knows his or her professor is going to be tough in advance then he or she can postpone that time-consuming internship for another semester, a win-win for the student and the professor.

In no other walk of life will students ever have as little control over their occupation as they do now. Most jobs can be quit easily, but in college, students receive a “W.” Professors can punish students with a bad grade and they have absolutely no recourse. In the hands of a good professor this power can be constructive, but when used by a bad professor it can be crushing. Do not risk that train wreck. Many of the poorly rated professors are very nice people, brilliant researchers or just need a little help on their public speaking. I implore them to prove their respectable critics wrong. Their ratings will rise and word will spread. It just takes the passion their best students exhibit every day to improve their own marks. Until then, though, students deserve more for their tuition. It is sad to see the students who fail to use Rate My Professors pull their hair out every semester, but for the rest of us, we know better.