Best and worst professors at UGA: how to choose without just using RateMyProfessor

Most students check RateMyProfessor (RMP) and stop there. RMP is useful, but it’s incomplete and biased in predictable ways. If RMP scores are all you go on, you’re deciding with half the information, and now and then it will burn you.

Why RateMyProfessor alone is not enough

RMP has a few structural problems, and they change how you should read it:

1. Selection bias dominates the reviews. The students most motivated to write a review had extreme experiences: they loved the professor or hated them. Students who took the class, did fine and moved on rarely write anything, so the reviews pile up at the two ends. A 3.5/5 average might be twenty 5’s, twenty 1’s and no 3’s, which is a very different class from a steady 3.5.

2. The “easy” rating is misleading. Sometimes a professor rated easy is well-organized and clear. Sometimes it’s a professor whose exams don’t match what’s on the cumulative final, and the class leaves under-prepared for the next course in the sequence. “Easy now, painful later” happens a lot in introductory science courses.

3. Recency matters more than RMP shows. Professors change. One with a brutal reputation from five years ago may have rebuilt the course since, and one who was beloved six years ago may be teaching the same lectures from outdated slides. The RMP average doesn’t give recent reviews more weight, so old ones can dominate a 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 every course together and hides the difference.

5. The ratings aren’t calibrated. A 3.5/5 from one student doesn’t mean what a 3.5/5 from another means. Some students rate on the grade they got, some on how interesting the lectures were, some on how nice the professor was, and nobody is working from a shared rubric.

None of this makes RMP useless. Treat it as one input, not the whole decision.

Where else to look

1. RateMyProfessor, read the right way. Read the 10 to 15 most recent reviews and ignore the average score. Look for patterns. Do several students raise the same complaint? Do this year’s reviews match the ones from three years ago? Comments about exam style, attendance policy and how the professor handles questions are usually accurate even when the overall rating swings around.

A Chrome and Firefox extension called “Rate My Professor for UGA” shows RMP scores inside Athena while you register. It pulls live data from RMP and puts ratings, difficulty scores and “Would Take Again” percentages next to each section. Install it before your registration window opens.

2. Coursicle. coursicle.com/uga has its own course and professor reviews, often from a different set of students than RMP’s. Compare the two. When they agree, the signal is stronger; when they disagree, go by the more recent and more detailed reviews. Coursicle also shows current offerings, capacity and past scheduling patterns, which helps when you plan later semesters.

3. UGA Course Syllabi Lookup. UGA keeps a public database of course syllabi. You can pull the syllabus from past semesters and see the grading breakdown, the attendance policy, the textbooks and the exam structure. For choosing a professor it’s the most useful tool on this list and the most underused one on campus. Most students never open it.

If a professor’s syllabus shows three exams at 25% each plus a 25% final, one bad day can sink your grade. If a syllabus shows weekly quizzes, homework and four exams, the grade is much easier to recover. You’ll find that in the syllabus and nowhere else.

4. The professor’s department page. Department sites often list research interests, recent publications and teaching history. A professor who researches the topic you’ll be studying tends to teach it with more depth and more current examples. One teaching far outside their research area sometimes teaches from the publisher’s slides, and the exams usually come out more generic.

5. Older students in your major. The best information you can get comes from a junior or senior who took the course recently. They know which exams are tricky, which professors care about office hours, and which courses pair reasonably with which. Ask in your major’s group chat, your advisor, your fraternity or sorority’s academic committee, or any club in your field.

6. ratemycourses.io/uga. A smaller review site that collects UGA-specific feedback. The sample is smaller than RMP’s, but the reviews tend to be more detailed and less polarized. Worth a look.

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

How to decide

When you have more than one professor to choose from for the same course, go through this in order:

Step 1: Rule out any professor whose syllabus structure doesn’t fit your situation. If you’re already carrying a hard semester, a course with three high-stakes exams and no homework to cushion them is a risk. If you have ADHD or trouble with executive function, a course where attendance is 25% of the grade is doing you a favor, because it forces consistency.

Step 2: Check RMP against Coursicle. If they say similar things about the professor, you can trust it. If they disagree, give more weight to the recent, detailed reviews.

Step 3: Read the five most recent RMP reviews carefully. Look for exam style (multiple choice, short answer or problem sets), how tough the grading is, whether the professor answers email and makes office hours worthwhile, and whether attendance counts. Those are factual claims, and they tend to be accurate.

Step 4: Pull at least one past syllabus from the UGA Course Syllabi Lookup. Confirm the structure: grading breakdown, number of exams, attendance, late-work policy.

Step 5: Ask one upperclassman 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 it against how you learn. You know whether you do better with structured lectures or discussion-heavy classes, and whether high-stakes exams sharpen you or wreck your sleep. Pick the professor whose course is built the way you learn.

Sequencing professors and prerequisites around a Zell Miller recovery, a pre-health track or a heavy major is the kind of problem academic coaching is for. Plan Your Semester →

Red flags worth taking seriously

These show up across sources and usually mean trouble:

• 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

One complaint about any of these is noise. Several from recent semesters are a 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 (a sign the teaching sticks)
• Syllabi with clear rubrics and expectations spelled out

Special cases

Large lecture courses with multiple sections (BIOL 1107, CHEM 1211, ECON 2105, MATH 1113). This is where the choice of professor matters most. Sections can differ by half a letter grade or more depending on who teaches them, so spend most of your research time here. The course 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, so don’t spend long researching. Look the professor up so you know what to expect, and adjust your study plan to fit.

Honors sections (1311H, 2107H, etc.). Smaller classes, usually more demanding content, and often a different approach to grading. They aren’t necessarily harder for the grade you’ll get; they often have better teaching and more responsive professors. Don’t skip a section because it says “honors.”

First-Year Odyssey Seminar professors. These are often the professors most enthusiastic about teaching undergraduates. The seminars are usually pass/fail or low-stakes, but the professors are worth remembering when you choose later courses.

When to get help with course planning

If you’re working around Zell Miller recovery, pre-health prerequisites, a Terry BBA application or an ADHD-friendly schedule, picking professors is one piece of a larger course-planning problem, and it’s worth taking the time to get right.