Yanjano Banda* describes the Rate My Professors website as their “Bible.”
“I use Rate My Professors for every single semester that I build my classes,” the fourth-year Carleton University journalism and film studies student said. “It’s been really helpful.”
The site allows post-secondary students to write anonymous reviews of professors. Users can rank instructors on a scale from one to five and share experience-specific information like what grade they achieved in the course and if the professor’s teaching style is especially lecture- or reading-heavy.
“The comments on Rate My Professors usually … reflect the truth about who the professor is,” Banda said.
Banda recently came across Carleton RMP, a Chrome extension allowing users to view professors’ average Rate My Professors’ ratings directly in Carleton Central, the university’s course selection website.
“[Now] I don’t have to click back and forth when searching up people,” Banda said. “It’s easy.”
Making Carleton students’ lives easier was precisely the goal for Shamoun Yousuf, the fourth-year computer science student who developed the Chrome extension that launched this month.
“I just wanted to have an easier way to check the rating of the professors,” Yousuf said. “This way made it a lot faster.”
When Chrome extension users view courses in Carleton Central, professors’ average ratings are listed under their name in a green, orange or red square depending on their score.
If the extension user hovers over the square, they can see the professor’s difficulty score ranked out of five, the percentage of students who say they would take the professor again, how many ratings factored into the score, plus a link to visit the instructor’s complete Rate My Professors page with student reviews.
Yousuf said he first had the idea for the extension in December 2024 and started to develop it in May 2025. While the extension is currently only available for Google Chrome, Yousuf said he hopes to expand to other browsers like Firefox or Safari.
The app has pulled in more than 120 users so far, according to the Chrome web store.
Andrew Cameron said he plans to use the extension to build his timetable for the final year of his computer science degree. Normally, Cameron makes a “giant” spreadsheet to lay out class time conflicts and Rate My Professors ratings to narrow down which courses he should take.
“I think it’s an amazing idea,” adding the extension means “one less step” in his course selection process.
Cameron said he finds Rate My Professors scores are “pretty good” metrics of instructors, despite occasional reviews from students who may have received a bad grade dragging down an average rating. He said the Chrome extension is an example of “students helping students.”
“We want to help each other have the best possible university experience,” Cameron said.
For third-year public affairs and policy management student Thomas André, the Chrome extension adds transparency to the course selection process, while he himself doesn’t necessarily rely solely on the website.
“It just gives people more information when making these decisions. I don’t think that’s ever a bad thing,” he said. “I think reading the comments is probably the best thing you can do.”
Yousuf and André noted that Rate My Professors ratings are imperfect — they may be skewed by “bitter students,” for example.
“Before just choosing a course based on the rating, I’d check the actual page,” Yousuf said. “Take it with a grain of salt.”
But for students like Banda, Rate My Professors is still especially helpful.
“It just largely helps, especially for new students to know which professors to avoid,” they said. “Rate My Professors was already a Bible that I constantly checked while choosing courses.
“Now, the extension kind of bridges those two websites together.”
*Yanjano Banda has previously contributed to the Charlatan.
Featured graphic by Alisha Velji/the Charlatan
