Open registration starts soon, and Internet savvy students will flock onto “Ratemyproffesors.com” to see who is hot, who is not, and hopefully find a class where they won’t have to buy the textbook.

Should the attractiveness of your teacher matter? No. Is it kinda funny? Yes. Should you trust a negative comment on an English professor when every other word is spelled wrong? Probably not.

While the minority of students seem to use Rate My Professor for actual learning purposes, most people are like Vivian Frolic who had used the site once. “(My friends and I) were just looking up all of our teachers, the cool and bad ones. Everything we saw was pretty accurate.”

From the professor’s side, it isn’t exactly fair to have a Yelp-style site where any kid who got a C on a quiz can anonymously run their good name through the dirt. Yet, some still defend “Ratemyprofessors.com” as a solid resource when used correctly.

Professor Greg Hammond explained, “I would recommend the site for a couple of things: students telling you what the class is like, if you will write a lot of papers or if you will use the textbook. But sometimes it is just angry people.”

Professor Gina Colantino had a more negative leaning opinion, “I like that students have access to a forum that aims to provide evaluation on courses and instructors; however, the criteria for judgment is overall vague and problematic. Judging “easiness” is (also) extremely problematic. Yikes- an easy class does not necessarily equal the best class. As for “hotness” – what does that even mean!?”

These instructors patiently teach us the same thing over and over again.  The same thing they taught the quarter before and the quarter before that.  They deserve an evaluation based from fact, not opinions from disgruntled students. Taking this into consideration, I went ahead and decided to judge them anyway.

Compared to how schooling used to be, we don’t have it so bad as students. Professor Shawn Dahl, who perfectly scored on Ratemyprofessors.com with a 5 out of 5, told me a story about his least favorite teacher and old school punishment. “In 1974, you have Watergate, class sizes are exploding, and this one teacher would walk around with a piece of a Hot Wheel track, and he would whack you!… Fourth graders! And if you had your head turned, he would walk by and grab your little sideburns” Whoa.

Old school teachers sound pretty rough. Let’s compare that with 1 out of 5 ratings for professors this year:

“She is a moody person and not very nice. Every time I email her asking questions, she is not         very polite when answering you and it did make me feel bad,”       or this one, “HE IS HORRIBLE WORST PROFESSOR EVER HE DOESNT CARE ABOUT      THE STUDENTS AND IF THEY LEARN OR NOT. DOESNT CARE ABOUT TEACHING            CONCEPTS MAKING LEARNING HORRIBLE” In all caps too, so you know they meant it.

Professor Greg Hammond ranked in the internet points for being an excellent instructor, someone who teaches life skills right along with his lesson plan. He’s also been labelled as a grade A piece of meat. He tried to play this down in an interview, “My ratings aren’t high in my abilities to teach you how to write, that’s not coming through, my ratings are high from the fact that students say that I teach them how to think.”

But then the subject of his undeniable swagger came up, “My hotness? I don’t get that as much as I used to, I think students are just being nice. The teachers who get the hotness ratings, they have it mentioned in their reviews. Like yeah, that person is hot…and it isn’t the same for me.” So humble.

Now, let’s compare that with some of these direct quotes from the site. “Greg Hammond is a genius,” one person wrote. He even received a 4 out of 5 rating from the person who left this amazing comment, “I can’t remember anything I learnt from this course” And, my personal favorite is from whoever left this gem, “one of the few elders i actually enjoy listening too.”

Hammond did admit to looking at his scores when he was feeling down, and why shouldn’t he? He earned them.

Professor Gina Colantino was likewise modest and witty in her explanation of hotness. “That mysterious chili pepper icon on Rate My Professors? I choose to interpret the “hotness” category as pertaining to the content of the course: “Red hot rhetoric!” “Sizzling semicolon guidelines!” “Stunning essay guidelines”.”

These two professors have the highest average of hotness, number of times rated and ratings, on Ratemyproffesors.com. Both were professional and humorous while being bombarded with questions about their sexiness.

Wesley Rolland, a student who has left a comment about a teacher, told me a story that seemed a bit more reasonable. “I had this English class, and the first day of class the teacher had like freeeaked out. So (on the site) I was like, “hey this dude just flipped out, the first day of class, when I had just sat down. He was just GONE, he was not having it, he just flipped out.” English isn’t my strongest subject and I need someone that I can learn from, so I looked at his ratings and they were 50/50, it seemed half liked him, and half wanted none of him. It was a love hate thing, so I withdrew. I’m sure he’s a really good teacher to a lot of people, he just wasn’t for me.”

The site can be a useful aid or, it can be complete crap. The pros and cons are clear. The cons: people leave skewed comments when they get bad grades, there is no way to identify the source of the information and it requires trusting the site. The pros: you might not need to buy unnecessary materials, you may find a teacher who fits your learning style or maybe you just like staring at good looking humans.

If you use the site take this piece of advice from Professor Colantino, “Strive to be professional in your critique. Feedback like ‘mean teacher’ or ‘boring class’ or ‘had annoying laugh’ is not productive as it doesn’t give any specific opportunities for improvement. Similarly, even if you loved a course and a particular instructor, consider proposing an idea to make the experience even better.”