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Though it may seem far away now, course selection season will soon thrust itself upon us once again. In just a few months students will be reading class descriptions and vetting sample syllabi, all in an effort to avoid that one terrible professor.
If you’re familiar with this stressful class-picking progress, you’ve probably used the popular faculty review site RateMyProfessors.com. Since it was started around 1999, RateMyProfessors has been the largest online destination for professor ratings, but it has a playful new challenger: the aptly-named, DrawYourProfessor.com.
DrawYourProfessor takes the basic idea of rating teachers and gives it a twist. Like RateMyProfessors, a student can search their college or university and view a list of staff members, but instead of ranking college faculty on a number scale, you judge your potential professors on DrawYourProfessor based on hackneyed doodles people have drawn of them.
Judging teachers solely by the equivalent of a Microsoft Paint document is pretty silly (the site’s creator Jesse Littlejohn said in an interview that most of the drawings seem to be motivated by “love of the professor” and “inside jokes”) but in fairness, how scientific is RateMyProfessors’ system anyway?
Though often helpful, RateMyProfessors has faced consistent backlash from teachers and students for its unscientific and often inaccurate ratings. The site allows for a one through five rating scale in several categories like “Helpfulness” and “Clarity,” but reviewers tend to review either extremely positively or negatively. The voluntary nature of the site also means reviews will often come from students who were either did really well in the class or really poorly — a biased system. Note: WAY too many teachers seem to get the chili pepper indication, an indication of “attractiveness.” Just saying.
Currently NYU’s DrawYourProfessor page doesn’t have too many drawings posted (John Sexton doesn’t even have a drawing yet for crying out loud!), but we think there is great potential here. Though a lot of the hundreds of drawings on the site are stick figures or abstract scribblings, the website’s weekly top ten page has some examples of funny, creative and sometimes ridiculously detailed doodles that describe teachers better than you might think. So get drawing, but remember, each entry is carefully reviewed, so don’t think you’ll get away with scrawling phalluses all over the place.
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