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O u r B e g i n n i n g s
View RamRatings articles/video in the news!
RamRatings was started in the summer of 2002 in an effort to help students at CSU in communicating with each other about the performance of professors in their classes.
At a university like CSU, where the total student enrollment exceeds 22,000, it can often be difficult to get information on a specific teacher from other students.
That's where RamRatings comes in.
Using the web, students can gather information about a professor's performance in many different categories, as well as rate and evaluate a professor themselves.
RamRatings encourages CSU students to rate all of their professors, the good and the bad. By being able to share and gather knowledge about various professors' teaching styles, RamRatings seeks to improve the campus community be communicating student needs to professors as well as helping students prepare for next semester's classes.
Like the first OpenRatings site, RamRatings.com is just starting out, and we need
your help to reach a critical mass of evaluations and communication between students; so take a few moments and rate your past professors. As more and more students do this, a comprehensive database of comments is built. Polyratings.com, the first OpenRatings sites, has over 8,000 evaluations now after 3 years of operating.
RamRatings was conceived and built by CSU students, for CSU students. Because we are independent of the university, we can guarantee anonymity, privacy, and free speech.
RamRatings is an installation of the open source professor ratings engine, OpenRatings.
RamRatings...know what you're in for.
A b o u t O p e n R a t i n g s
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Want to know which professor 'seems a few French fries short of a happy meal?'
Well, there's an Internet Web site for you.
—Los Angeles Times Article about the first OpenRatings site, Polyratings.com
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Most people think of the Internet as a mind-boggling network of computers and
technology. But the truth is, it's an unprecedented network of people, more
specifically, students. Thousands of students just like you, who have already
been where you want to go, or are following a path that you've already
taken.
Those words that appeared on a website in 1999, at the beginning of it all.
Two students in a dorm at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis
Obispo were trying to figure out which professor they wanted to take that
quarter. And, like most students, they wanted professors that wanted to be in
the class room... professors that genuinely cared about their students and
wanted to teach them.
They of course, asked their friends, but none of their friends had taken the
classes they needed to take. So an idea was born: why not use the Internet
to facilitiate the communcation between students about the quality of an
institution's professors?
OpenRatings is a unique open source project in that not only are we offering
freedom in terms of free speech (the source code) and free beer (as in no
exchange of money), but free speech as in... free speech. The open source
model is helping to protect the rights of over 16,000 students who've posted
over some 8,000 evaluations, and that's just at Cal Poly. Open source is
defending not only the freedom of the collegiate programmers of the world,
but the free speech rights of every student on every campus in America that
wants to let other students know what they're in for.
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