Scheduling for the first time is a stressful process, but there are many helpful tips, which range from academic advisors to websites aggregating student opinion, to make the process easier.
Rate My Professor is a popular website that is designed to help rate professors in a variety of categories.
The categories are helpfulness, clarity, easiness, hotness and overall. Students who have had the teacher leave comments about their personal experience with the professor as well.
“It allowed me to know more about the class and what it entailed, like how strict the professor was and the difficulty of the class,” said Wyatt Ferrell, an undecided sophomore. “For the most part it was accurate. There are some people when you look that give them the best rating just because they have a personal connection with the professor, but there were also a fair amount of people that didn’t do well on the course so they evaluated the professor poorly.”
Whether this site is accurate with its ratings depends on who is asked.
“I don’t know how beneficial and factual the comments on this site are,” said
Karen Deardorff, an instructor in advanced organizational communication. “My perception is that there are two primary categories of student who post on this site: those who are extremely pleased with their professor and those who are not pleased.”
Many OU faculty members stress the site can be misleading due to the nature of student feedback.
“I think that students sometime rely too much on Rate My Professor when choosing classes,” said Kathryn Warren, an OU academic. “For students who are trying to decide which classes to take, they should reach out to their academic advisor or the course instructor to discuss these classes and then decide what would be a good fit.”
For first-year students it can be very challenging to schedule, but rest assured it is very hard to butcher the first schedule. As a freshman there are many general education courses that are needed, and then specific major courses on top of those. More than likely whatever course is chosen is something that can be useful.
“As a first-year student you have so many options for classes to take,” Warren said. “Whether you enter college undecided or with a major already declared, you will definitely have a complete and appropriate class schedule. The general education requirements at OU give all students the opportunity to explore new topics and areas of interest.“
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