Best and Worst Professors at UGA: How to Choose Without Just Using RateMyProfessor

Picking the right professor at UGA can be the difference between a 3.7 semester and a 3.1 semester. The professor determines exam style, grading curve (or lack of one), workload, attendance policy, and how much your study habits will need to flex. Two students can take “the same course” with different professors and have wildly different experiences.

Most students rely on RateMyProfessor (RMP) and call it a day. RMP is useful, but it’s also incomplete and systematically biased. If you’re picking your professors based only on RMP scores, you’re making decisions on partial information — and you’ll occasionally get burned.

This guide walks through the full toolkit serious UGA students use, why RMP alone is risky, and a decision framework for picking professors that actually fit your learning style.

Why RateMyProfessor Alone Is Not Enough

RateMyProfessor has structural problems that affect how you should read it:

1. Selection bias dominates the reviews. The students most motivated to write a review are the ones with extreme experiences — either loved the professor or hated them. Students who took the class, did fine, and moved on rarely write anything. This means RMP reviews are skewed toward the tails. A 3.5/5 average score might represent twenty 5’s, twenty 1’s, and zero 3’s — an experience that is very different from a steady 3.5.

2. The “easy” rating is misleading. A professor rated as easy is sometimes genuinely well-organized and clear. They are also sometimes a professor whose exams don’t reflect what’s actually on the cumulative final, leaving students under-prepared for the next course in the sequence. “Easy now, painful later” is a real pattern in introductory science courses.

3. Recency matters more than RMP shows. Professors evolve. A professor with a brutal reputation from five years ago may have completely overhauled their course. A professor who was beloved six years ago may be teaching the same lectures from outdated slides. The RMP average doesn’t weight recency, so old reviews can dominate the score for years.

4. Course context is missing. The same professor can be excellent in a 40-person upper-level seminar and miserable in a 250-person introductory course. RMP usually averages all course experiences together, hiding the variation.

5. There is no calibration. A 3.5/5 from one student means something different than a 3.5/5 from another. Some students rate based on grade received; some based on how interesting the lectures were; some based on how nice the professor was. There is no shared rubric.

None of this means RMP is useless. It means you should treat it as one input, not the entire decision.

The Full Toolkit (Use These Together)

1. RateMyProfessor (with the right reading method). Read the most recent 10 to 15 reviews, ignoring the average score. Look for patterns: do multiple students mention the same complaint? Do reviews from the past year line up with reviews from three years ago? Pay attention to comments about exam style, attendance policy, and how the professor handles questions — these are usually accurate even when the overall rating is volatile.

There is a Chrome and Firefox extension called “Rate My Professor for UGA” that displays RMP scores directly inside Athena during course registration. It pulls live data from RMP and shows ratings, difficulty scores, and “Would Take Again” percentages right next to each section. Install it before your registration window opens.

2. Coursicle. coursicle.com/uga has its own course and professor reviews, often with a different reviewer base than RMP. Cross-reference the two — when both sources agree, the signal is stronger. When they disagree, dig into the more recent and more detailed reviews. Coursicle also shows current course offerings, capacity, and historical scheduling patterns, which is useful for planning future semesters.

3. UGA Course Syllabi Lookup (the most underused tool on campus). UGA maintains a public course syllabi database. You can pull the actual syllabus from past semesters and see exactly what the grading breakdown is, what the attendance policy is, what textbooks are used, and what the exam structure looks like. This is the single highest-signal tool for picking a professor — and most students never open it.

If a professor’s syllabus shows three exams worth 25% each plus a 25% final, that’s a high-stakes course where one bad day can sink your grade. If the same professor’s syllabus shows weekly quizzes, homework, and four exams, the grade is much more recoverable. This information is in the syllabus and nowhere else.

4. The professor’s department page. Department websites often list research interests, recent publications, and teaching history. A professor whose research is on the topic you’ll be studying tends to teach with more depth and current examples. A professor teaching far outside their research area sometimes teaches from publisher-provided slides, which usually leads to more generic exams.

5. Older students in your major. The single highest-quality information source is a junior or senior who took the course recently. They know which exams are tricky, which professors care about office hours, and which courses are reasonable to pair with which other courses. Ask through your major’s group chat, your advisor, your fraternity or sorority’s academic committee, or any club related to your field.

6. ratemycourses.io/uga. A smaller alternative review site that aggregates UGA-specific feedback. Smaller sample size than RMP, but the reviews tend to be more detailed and less polarized. Worth a check.

7. Your academic advisor. Advisors won’t recommend specific professors directly (they’re not allowed to rank colleagues), but they will often give you useful guidance on course pairings, teaching styles, and which sections fit which kinds of students. The conversation is more useful than most students expect.

A Decision Framework That Actually Works

When you have multiple professor options for the same course, run through this in order:

Step 1: Eliminate any professor whose syllabus structure doesn’t fit your situation. If you’re already managing a hard semester, a course with three high-stakes exams and no homework safety net is risky. If you have ADHD or executive function challenges, a course where attendance is 25% of the grade is doing you a favor — it forces consistency. Match the structure to your needs.

Step 2: Cross-check RMP and Coursicle for consistency. If both sources say similar things about the professor, the signal is reliable. If they disagree, weight the more recent and more detailed reviews more heavily.

Step 3: Read the most recent five RMP reviews carefully. Look for: exam style (multiple choice vs. short answer vs. problem sets), grading toughness, whether the professor is responsive to email or office hours, and whether attendance matters. These are factual claims that tend to be accurate.

Step 4: Pull at least one past syllabus from the UGA Course Syllabi Lookup. Verify the structural details — grading breakdown, exam count, attendance, late-work policy.

Step 5: Ask one upper-classman in your major. A 30-second answer from someone who took the class six months ago beats two hours of internet research.

Step 6: Match against your own learning style. You know whether you do better with structured lectures or discussion-heavy classes. You know whether high-stakes exams help you focus or wreck your sleep. Pick the professor whose course design matches the way you actually learn.

Red Flags Worth Taking Seriously

Patterns that consistently signal trouble across multiple sources:

• Reviews saying “the professor doesn’t answer questions” or “office hours aren’t useful”
• Heavy attendance penalties combined with confusing or hard-to-follow lectures
• Exams that “don’t reflect what was taught in class”
• Major grading discrepancies between sections of the same course
• TA-graded work with no recourse (especially in writing-heavy courses)
• Courses where the syllabus doesn’t include sample exams or rubrics

A single complaint about any of these is noise. Multiple complaints from recent semesters are signal.

Green Flags Worth Seeking Out

• Professors who post old exams or sample questions
• Professors who explicitly invite questions in office hours and respond to email within 24 to 48 hours
• Course structures with multiple grade components (homework + quizzes + exams), giving you recovery options
• Reviews from recent students that mention specific things they learned (suggests durable, applicable teaching)
• Syllabi with clear rubrics and expectations spelled out

Special Cases

Large lecture courses with multiple sections (BIOL 1107, CHEM 1211, ECON 2105, MATH 1113). These are the courses where professor choice matters most. Sections can vary by half a letter grade or more depending on the instructor. Spend the most research time on these. The course-specific guides are worth reading alongside this one: MATH 1113, BIOL 1107/1108, and CHEM 1211/1212.

Required courses with one section per semester. You don’t have a choice. Don’t waste time researching — just look up the professor to know what to expect, and adjust your study plan accordingly.

Honors sections (1311H, 2107H, etc.). Smaller class sizes, usually more demanding content, and often a different grading approach. Honors sections are not necessarily harder for the grade you’ll receive — they often have stronger pedagogy and more responsive professors. Don’t avoid them just because they’re “honors.”

First-Year Odyssey Seminar professors. These are often the professors most enthusiastic about teaching undergraduates. The seminars are typically pass/fail or low-stakes, but the professors are worth seeking out for future course choices.

When to Get Help with Course Planning

If you’re managing complex constraints — Zell Miller recovery, pre-health prerequisites, a Terry BBA application, or an ADHD-friendly schedule — picking professors is part of a larger course-planning problem. Getting it right is worth real time.