No More Chili Pepper: RateMyProfessors Ditches ‘Hotness’ Ratings

RateMyProfessors.com, an online forum for students to rate their instructors, this week quietly dropped a prominent and widely criticized category: the chili pepper, denoting a professor’s physical appearance. The website said on Tuesday that it had acted after receiving numerous complaints, from female professors on Twitter, that the symbol is sexist.

BethAnn McLaughlin, an assistant professor of neurology and pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, tweeted at RateMyProfessors after learning that a recent National Academy of Sciences study had found high levels of sexual harassment of women in the sciences and technology. She began thinking about how such behavior develops, she told The Chronicle, and that led her to consider the student evaluation process and the RateMyProfessors site.

“For RateMyProfessors to use this jocular way to evaluate people is gross,” said McLaughlin.

Before the category was dropped, site users could assign ratings of “hot” or “not” to professors, and according to the website, a professor who scored a net value of one or more “hot” was granted a chili-pepper image. The chili-pepper rating had existed since the site’s inception, nearly two decades ago, culminating every year with a “Hottest Professors” list.

The company that runs the website did not respond to requests for comment. In a reply tweet to McLaughlin, RateMyProfessors said that “the chili-pepper rating is meant to reflect a dynamic/exciting teaching style. But your point is well taken, and we’ve removed all chili-pepper references from the RateMyProfessors site.”

McLaughlin said the chili-pepper rating prevented students from understanding the dynamic of a professional relationship and, even more critically, hampered women’s careers in academe. Many researchers have shown that even when teaching the same curriculum, female instructors are consistently rated lower than their male counterparts in student evaluations.

Kristina Mitchell, director of online regional and site education at Texas Tech University, conducted a study, published in March, with a male colleague, Jonathan Martin. The two each taught an identical online course and then compared the evaluations of their teaching at RateMyProfessors.com. Martin scored higher in every RateMyProfessors category.

“What we noticed was that students were much more likely to comment on my appearance and my personality, and to call me a ‘teacher,’” said Mitchell. “They were a lot more likely to mention his competence or refer to him as a ‘professor.’”

Mitchell said the language used in the ratings indicated that “we were evaluated on two different sets of criteria.”

“I was either getting comments that my personality wasn’t good or that my body was being sexually objectified,” she said. “Students were looking at me not as a source of expertise on a topic, but either as a barrier to them not getting the grade they wanted because I’m too mean, or as a potential sexual conquest.”

Still, Mitchell said, she wasn’t surprised by the results, as other studies have documented how women and men are evaluated differently.

‘Kind of a Joke’

Philip B. Stark, a professor of applied and theoretical statistics at the University of California at Berkeley, said that in his research on the accuracy of student evaluations of teaching effectiveness, he found that the existing gender bias is consistent in almost every aspect of the field — approving grant proposals, grading papers, and providing letters of reference, to name a few.

“There’s gender bias in so many things in academia and the professional world,” Stark said.

Stark’s research also showed that, for the same effort, women are rated lower on their teaching effectiveness. He considers that pattern part of a larger problem with the validity of student evaluations.

Teaching effectiveness, he said, is not something that can be defined, which is why students, when evaluating, inadvertently think of other environmental factors that affected their learning, including how far they were able to sit from the front of the room, their grades on quizzes and exams, and the appearance of the professor.

“We would like to measure effectiveness,” he said. “We can’t. We measure something else and pretend it’s the same thing.”

In some ways, Stark said, RateMyProfessors’ chili-pepper rating was more honest and straightforward than most student evaluations.

Because of their unreliability, Stark said, student evaluations should not be so influential on the career paths of professors. That’s especially true, he said, for evaluations on sites like RateMyProfessors, whose users are self-selected, making the comments subject to bias, even without the chili-pepper category. Given the evidence, he said, the use of student evaluations is “really unethical.”

RateMyProfessors is a popular website among students, but it is not generally used as a formal evaluation tool. It has, however, helped inspire colleges to pilot new methods of student feedback.

Mitchell agreed that student evaluations should not be used to measure a professor’s success, and said that professors should inform students of research like hers, so they are more aware of existing biases before making an evaluation. She thinks RateMyProfessors’ decision to drop the chili-pepper rating is a significant step in the right direction.

But even without the chili pepper, many professors still object to the site because of its anonymity. Marie Hicks, an associate professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said the lack of accountability among site users reinforces “sexist, heteronormative” behaviors. She also said she fears that now that the company has dropped the offensive rating, it will start to earn more respect among administrators involved in hiring.

“RateMyProfessors has always been kind of a joke, and hopefully this doesn’t make it seem as though it is something to be taken more seriously,” Hicks said.

McLaughlin was surprised by how quickly the website’s operators had responded to her tweet to remove the chili pepper, and she commended them for doing so. Despite some of the “vitriol” the site creates, she said it is still important for student evaluations to be heard and considered.

“Any forum to promote students and professors to talk more about the educational process,” she said, “is positive.”