How do you deal with your Rate My Professor ratings?
I am not a professor. Perhaps it would be useful to you to understand this from a student's perspective. I am a PhD candidate and did my undergrad at the same school I'm in the PhD program for. This has given me some unique insight into the difference between what is put on a review, and the actual person (one of whom I work with closely) in reality.
RateMyProfessor encourages extremely harsh reviews. From a professor's perspective this is simply noise in the channel.
As a student RateMyProfessor became virtually worthless after I got through the middle of my undergraduate courses. Early undergraduate courses tended to be a grab-bag of instructors and professors. Some of them not even in the same field they are teaching. You will find that as course numbers increase and topic becomes specific (implying higher difficulty) the ratings skew heavily to the negative. The conclusion here, I think, is obvious. Student's want easy grades. But the explanation for that is not simply &quot;students are lazy&quot;. As a student I didn't really get time to enjoy my classes. In order to graduate in 4 years I had to stay focused entirely on two goals: (1) minimize time spent studying (because I had several classes to worry about as well as a part time job) and (2) maximize my grade. I got out of my CS program with a 3.7 GPA which given that I took several hard classes really amounted to a mixture of actual work ethic, careful selection of professor, and time management.
You might say &quot;well that's quite contrary to what I'd expect of a PhD-worthy undergraduate!&quot; given that I am a PhD candidate. But truth be told, it wasn't until my last semester of undergrad when my course load was low that I really got to enjoy my classes for what they were. Until then, it was simply a game. Optimize the parameters of the equation whose solution is your graduation. The crushing weight of both expectation (get a good job) and retaking classes costing significantly more money made this equation my single greatest concern. Though you didn't say you were in the US I am speaking from a US standpoint. This is absolutely a consequence of extremely high prices for classes (where failure isn't a financial option), the unspoken requirement of a college degree for a good job, and the time crunch to get into industry to make some actual money.
Knowing this, take these things with a grain of salt. Know that especially if you are teaching undergraduate courses your students are adversarial. You could be a bad teacher, that is certainly a possibility, but more likely you have screwed up their solution to the equation required to graduate. Keep this in mind and seriously evaulate whether you are a measurably bad professor or you are teaching a hard subject and students who misinterpreted your presentation (as in you, personally) are upset you screwed up the game they are playing.