With course registration coinciding with midterms, fitting in classes and cross-referencing Rate My Professors is often a burden. But one new Google Chrome extension could change that.
The extension, called RateMyPaul, was created by DePaul students Ozer Chagatai, a senior who studies software engineering, and Serguei Fedorov, who studies videogame programming. They noticed their friends would often open Rate My Professors in a separate window to choose classes, and created Rate My Paul to expedite the process and as a fun side project.
“Both me and Serguei are web developers, so we had the required skill set to make this before we started,” Chagatai said. “The original version took about a week to make, and we’ve been releasing on a weekly basis ever since.”
Because course evaluations are public for CDM students, Chagatai wanted to make this true for all schools at DePaul.
“Rate My Professor is like Yelp for professors,” he said. “It simply facilitates the student’s reviews, and it doesn’t ping you for two weeks to write an evaluation.”
DePaul’s Student Government Association has pushed since the early 2000s for course evaluations to be visible to students. SGA President Matthew von Nida projected that evaluations for the College of Science & Health, Driehaus College of Business, School for New Learning and The Theatre School will be visible by registration time for fall quarter. SGA is currently working with the College of Communication.
“Having visible evaluations is beneficial,” von Nida said. “It allows students to see how their evaluations benefit the class and benefit other students.”
Through this measure, students would be able to see course evaluations from the last three quarters of the course being taught.
DePaul student Tyler Wolfe-Adam, a junior majoring in computer science, found the extension convenient because it reduces on-screen clutter when choosing classes, as he always used Rate My Professor for choosing classes.
“My screen isn’t very large, (so) having two browser windows open side by side was very cluttered and awkward to navigate,” Wolfe-Adam said. “Between my cluttered interface and enjoyment level — or lack thereof — towards picking classes, this extension solves the stressful and cluttered dilemma.”
He suggested that an option to see how many people contributed to a professor’s rating should be incorporated in the future.
“An overall grade of C- from 100-plus ratings could mean a very different thing from an overall grade of C- from 2 ratings,” he said.
For now, Chagatai and his team are continuing to make improvements and fix bugs on RateMyPaul.
“We’re hoping to improve the speed at which the extension brings you the reviews,” Chagatai said. “We’re also hoping that the extension will result in a higher number of students who leave reviews on Rate My Professor.”