A new Google Chrome extension created by two Carleton students aims to help students build their timetables on Carleton Central.
The extension, Rate CU, makes the ratings from RateMyProfessor.com visible alongside Carleton courses when students are building their timetable.
“While you’re browsing courses on Carleton Central, Rate CU gives you the option of ‘Show Rating’. It can give you the rating of the professor directly from RateMyProfessor.com,” said Paul Yammine, one of the founders of Rate CU.
“Students can click and compare ratings between two or more professors for one class so they can choose which professor is the best fit for them,” said Chris Baker, the other founder of Rate CU.
Both Baker and Yammine are third-year computer science students at Carleton who said they “did this project for fun.”
After its first week, their project has gotten positive feedback from Carleton students who have downloaded the app to assist them with their timetables.
“When I saw the Rate CU app on Facebook, I downloaded it and it works amazingly well,” said second-year journalism student Naomi Librach. “It’s just very helpful in terms of speed, efficiency, and making sure that you pick a class that will be good for you.”
However, Angelo Mingarelli, the current Chair External Communication and past president of the Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA), warned that students need to use rating sites like RateMyProfessor.com with caution.
“It’s not entirely representational. It doesn’t say if the professor is good for office hours, or their availability outside of class. It’s very general,” Mingarelli said.
Yammine and Baker said they are trying their best to avoid bias by having the app display how many people participated in a professor’s rating.
“The ratings are straight from the website. We incorporated a feature in the app to see how many ratings the score is based off,” Baker said. “It might just be one guy who is angry about the class. We are not playing a part in altering any views of professors—we are just displaying the ratings and letting people take what they can from that.”
Baker added the name of each professor is linked to their page on RateMyProfessor.com in case students wanted to look at further comments.
CUASA uses the Carleton teacher evaluation system from students to rate professors at the end of the year, but Mingarelli said there is no policy on campus that professors must share these results.
Since these official results are often not public, unless made so by the professor, students often use other sources like RateMyProfessor.com.
More than 400 students have downloaded Rate CU this week, according to Baker, and he added those numbers are likely to increase with course selections nearing in June.
