Wow, I sure missed this story! The Huffington Post shared the 2013 RateMyProfessors.com Best Professors ranking and Gustavus is 16th. I knew I was surrounded by greatness here. How cool to be a part of this faculty now!
And, although RMP has its issues, the increasing body of research shows it is not so easy to dismiss RMP as biased, irrelevant, or unreliable. There is work indicating that student ratings can be reliable after about 10 ratings, and also that RMP maps reliably onto traditional course evaluations in two important areas: quality of instruction and workload.
RMP maybe doesn’t help its own reputation when it has events like today’s Reddit Ask Me Anything with the recipient of the #1 Hottest Professor rating (I wonder if that is going on his c.v.?). Sure, too, RMP has issues about who can rate, and ratings can be skewed. But it’s becoming more clear that the RMP we all trashed as ridiculous and biased when it first came out is becoming more of a legitimate tool for students.