These rankings – called the Top Lists 2012-2013 – were generated by averaging the student ratings of professors’ “Overall Quality” in combination with its “Overall School Rating”, which is created by averaging its Campus Ratings. The Overall Quality of a professor is rated on a 5-point Likert scale. To generate the rankings, the ratings from the past three years for each professor are standardized and then weighted according to recentness. Anyone with access to the internet can contribute to the ratings.
Several peer institutions including Vanderbilt University, Stanford University, and Washington University in St. Louis were also ranked highly, filling in the second, fourth, and seventh spot, respectively.
“I’m happy that Duke is receiving this positive image in the media,” said senior Camille Carre. “I’ve had great experiences with Duke faculty during my past three years, and I think they deserve the ranking.”
Some students and faculty have received the rankings with skepticism. Duke wasn’t ranked within the top 25 universities a year ago, and the methodology used only requires that professors have a minimum of 30 ratings.
“From a sampling perspective, the only way we’d know for sure [if these rankings are accurate] is to have a random sample from all schools,” said Dr. Mark Leary, a professor in the department of Psychology and Neuroscience who currently has a rating of 4.8 out of 5 in Overall Quality on RateMyProfessors.com. “No researcher would only require 30 participants for a scientific study.”
Furthermore, by its nature, the site tends to attract students who either intensely like or dislike particular professors, and can therefore be biased.
“The ratings are due to a school’s particular student norms about how you post and what you post,” Leary said, “and so the accuracy is called into question.”
According to RateMyProfessors.com, the site serves to help students “figure out who's a great professor,” and it is the highest trafficking site for researching universities and professors.
“Despite the valid criticism against it, I think it still shows that students at Duke are happy with their professors, which is the most important thing,” sophomore Emily Schmitz said.
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