Short answer: you don't.

In fact, it's potentially worse than that... you don't even know that someone rating a professor, assuming they are a student, which is a huge assumption to make, ever took a professor's class.

RamRatings.com does everything in its power to review questionable postings brought to our attention, but a function of RamRatings' privacy guarantee is lack of authentication and login. This means that a professor could post positive ratings about themselves to their pages, or negative ratings about other professors (both of which have happened on other sites).

We have been looking into ways of curbing this practice, but for now, RamRatings users will have to rely on their own judgement in determining which ratings to consider to be accurate; if you think about it, that requirement is no different than information you get from any other source.

If you believe a rating comes from a questionable source, please report it.

The standard by which we judge all comments is a simple one: value.

We do not judge comments based upon the words they contain or the way they express their opinion, but if a comment is reported as innapropriate, we look to see what value it adds to both RamRatings.com and to CSU students in general.

- Calling a professor names is not only immature, but does not add value.

- Posting anything but a comment (emails, test questions, etc.) about the professor does not add value.

- Replying to other comments instead of giving your own opinion on the professor does not add value.

Value to the student community is the gold standard by which we rate comments when problems are brought to our attention... if the comment lacks value, it will be deleted.

RamRatings' staff does not have time to read and approve every comment.

As such, we only hear about inappropriate comments after the fact; just because a comment appears does not mean that it's been reviewed and deemed acceptable.

If you see an inappropriate comment, report it; over 90% of the comments reported as inappropriate are either removed or moderated to remove offending material.

As a side note, the ratings engine does support an "approval process" for comments, but as stated earlier, we don't have time to approve every comment, so we don't personally use it.

Answer: No.

If we made time to personally edit every student's comments, we'd never have time for our own school work. Think before you post.

Besides, there's the side issue of verifying that the person who's requesting we remove or edit the post is the one who really wrote it, which opens up a whole different can of worms.

As such, any requests to edit or delete comments will be ignored.

Despite the fact that this is not a question, we often get comments like this from professors and occasionally from students (if you can believe it) and we'd like to clarify our position on these types of emails.

In a nutshell, you can't sue the web site. You may think a comment about you is defamatory and libelous, and it may very well be.

But, we didn't write the comment. The comment is not ours; it's the property of the student who wrote it and while you're welcome to sue the author (assuming you can find out who they are), you really can't sue RamRatings.com, because we haven't broken any laws (and you wouldn't get any money out of us poor college students anyway).

So please... if you find inappropriate content in reference to you on RamRatings.com, please notify us. But don't write a scathing email threatening to sue us. For one, it makes your credibility go way down because you're threatening something you can't deliver on and secondly, it also doesn't really endear us to help you, even though over 98% of the time we're notified of inappropriate content, we side with the reporter of the content and not the author.

Even if they are threatening to sue the crap out of us.

We felt it was necessary to answer this question because when offered a keyword search, people will invariably enter... shall we say interesting search terms.

If, by chance, a professor's name comes up when searched with particularly unflattering keywords, we want to deflect the question which will invariably be asked: how do you rate professors based upon keywords submitted in searches?

The technical answer? We implement keyword searches by querying a full-text index which was created on the database table containing the text of the evaluations. This is a built-in feature of the database RamRatings uses; technical specifications for the full-text index can be found here.

If that answer made no sense, here's the shorter version: the database has built-in search capabilities to do "natural language"-based searches. These searches take the word(s) entered by the user and perform a statistical analysis on all of the comments submitted. Comments which include all of the words in the given order are rated higher than comments which only contain a few words out of the keyword list. This is all done by the database's full-text index searching module, and we simply pass the keywords as we receive them on to the searching algorithm's engine.

So, if you're unhappy that a professor's name pops up when searching on any particular term(s), don't complain to us; complain to the Statistics department: they probably invented the algorithm you're unhappy with.

Visit the professor addition station; be prepared to rate the professor you're suggesting we add. We do this because we want to have an initial evaluation for every professor we add (as we're sure you do).