Rate My Professor

INTRODUCTION

For about 14 years, RateMyProfessor.com (RMP) is a platform for students to assign ratings to professors and leave comments about their teaching style. RMP is considered the largest online review site for professors. It has around 1,700,000 professors from more than 8,000 schools from Canada, the United State, and the United Kingdom. More than 15,000,000 comments were posted by students, indicating the popularity of the website.

Project objectives

In the presence of new communication technology, our project will use RMP as an example to explore the potential of utilizing such information technology. By analyzing students' motivation and perception to RMP and the impact it has on students and professors; we will give recommendations from two aspects: ways to integrate RMP into the decision-making process for universities' managers and directions to improve the functionality and usefulness of RMP for the company.

The purposes of this report are to:

* Analyze the influence of RMP on students’ decision–making process of selecting courses

* Identify the factors that affect the utility of RMP, the significance of such factors, with respect to the decision-making process of selecting a course

* Analyze recommendations suggested by literature review and critically assess the effectiveness

* Propose ways to improve the validity of RMP

Project Scope

This project consists of surveys to the population of SFU business students in order to analyze the impact of RMP on students’ decision-making process. By primary research as well as secondary research, we will determine if there are any possible factors such as rating bias that limit the reliability and usability of RMP. We will also assess the value of RMP to school managers by interviewing them. Furthermore, other review-based websites such as Tripadvisor and Amazon will be analyzed to observe any possible features that could be used to enhance the functionality of RMP...