Analysing RateMyProfessors Evaluations Across Institutions, Disciplines, and Cultures: The Tell-Tale Signs of a Good Professor

Can we tell a good professor from their students’ comments? And are there differences between what is considered to be a good professor by different student groups? We use a large corpus of student evaluations collected from the RateMyProfessors website, covering different institutions, disciplines, and cultures, and perform several comparative experiments and analyses aimed to answer these two questions. Our results indicate that (1) we can reliably classify good professors from poor professors with an accuracy of over 90%, and (2) we can separate the evaluations made for good professors by different groups with accuracies in the range of 71-89%. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis performed using topic modeling highlights the aspects of interest for different student groups.