‘Brilliant’ Philosophers and ‘Funny’ Psychology Instructors: What a Data-Visualization Tool Tells Us About How Students See Their Professors

Beth McMurtrie:

A few years ago, Schmidt mined 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessors to create an interactive tool, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews. Plug a term into the chart and you can see how many times per million words of text it is used, broken down by gender and discipline. It’s a fascinating — and highly addictive — look at the way in which students perceive their professors. At times the results can seem absurd.

Schmidt’s original plan was to write an article about the tool, which he created in 2015. But, he says, “I couldn’t quite figure out what that article would say, so I just put it online.”

The tool turned out to be quite popular: People have entered about 50,000 to 100,000 search terms every month. “It’s been interesting because I see a lot of people use it for a lot of different things,” Schmidt says, including introductory teaching workshops and diversity training programs. While data from RateMyProfessors obviously has limitations — the reviews are voluntary, for one — Schmidt says that a lot of his findings correlate with what the research shows about how students evaluate professors differently, based on gender.

So, how do students describe their male and female professors? Let’s take a look.

Who’s funnier? Men, apparently. Male psychology professors, it seems, are particularly hilarious. Men are so funny, in fact, that even the most somber among them — that would be engineering professors — are funnier than most women, scoring 797 references per million words of text, a higher number than women in 16 other disciplines.

But take heart, female psychology professors. Like your male counterparts, you’re also funnier than your female colleagues in every other discipline.