Rating Your Prof

If you go to Rate My Professor you can have a good time looking us up and amusing yourself with some of the caustic revenge comments by students about their teachers. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) these ratings are not used for anything, especially as we're required after every class to have class evaluations. Those can count, but that's a different story.

(As an aside, I made a comment in a department meeting the other day about how the only faculty who don't like course evaluations are those with low course evaluations. Yes, I successfully trolled a faculty member who stepped right into it. Me for the win).

I dumped the Grady College faculty who are listed on the site and ranked them from first to worst, at least as far as Rate My Professor is concerned. A bunch of folks listed are no longer at Grady or UGA (or even living, for that matter). Some have retired, some have moved to teach elsewhere. Excluding them, here are the Top Five with the rating on a 1-to-5 scale and the number of ratings in parentheses (more on this after the list).

1. Valerie Boyd, 5.0 (3 ratings)
2. Joe Phau, 5.0 (2 ratings)
3. Jeffrey Jones 5.0 (1 rating)
4. Kirsten Strausbaugh-Hutchinson, 4.9 (4 ratings)
5. Vicki Michaelis, 4.8 (6 ratings)

By the way, on the list above I'm 11th. As you methodologists out there know, so few ratings lead to enormous error. If we look only at those who have 10 or more ratings (and are still at Grady), a number I admittedly chose at random, we find a very different order.

1. Jay Hamilton, 4.3 (31 ratings)
2. Barry Hollander, 4.3 (12 ratings)
3. Tom Reichert, 3.8 (22 ratings)
4. John Soloski, 3.0 (43 ratings)
5. Leara Rhodes, 2.9 (12 ratings)

Note that the list right above is all five folks who are still at Grady with 10 or more ratings, so making the Top Five is no biggie (hence I'm on the list). 

Are these predictive of anything? I'd love to correlate them with course evaluations but, unfortunately, I don't want to make an expensive public records request for all those evals. I can say my own 4.3 score is close to what I get on class evals, with those on a 1-to-5 scale usually falling around 4.5 or so, give or take. I've hit 4.9 as a high, 3.5 as a low.

Below, the complete list with faculty, living or dead, still at Grady or not, in order from first to worst.

Rating	Last Name
5	Boyd
5	Phua
5	Jones
5	Macias
5	Ryan
4.9	Brooks
4.9	S.-Hutchinson
4.8	Michaelis
4.8	Jones
4.8	Hillier
4.7	Smith
4.7	Sallot
4.6	Fink
4.5	Greenman
4.5	Ahn
4.5	Lin
4.4	Dennis
4.3	Hamilton
4.3	Hollander
4.3	Hudson
4.3	Burns
4.2	Suggs
4.2	Parks
4	Hume
4	Thomas
3.9	Weaver
3.9	Hollifield
3.8	Reichert
3.7	Blackmon
3.5	Benjamin
3.5	Lee
3.5	Deal
3.5	Kwon
3.5	Smith
3.4	Dominick
3.2	Becker
3.1	Kreshel
3	Soloski
3	Middleton
3	Murendehle
2.9	Rhodes
2.8	Tinkham
2.7	Lariscy
2.3	Griswold