Professor ratings simmer down

Online rating system takes down controversial chili pepper rating of faculty

CHRIS TORRES Reporter @chris_t_torres

In the world of higher education, something as mundane as a chili pepper has become a brand for prejudice.

RateMyProfessors.com, a website where college students can grade their professors, has removed the “chili pepper” rating after many teachers complained on social media for it being a sexist symbol.

BethAnn Mclaughlin, a Vanderbilt University neuroscience professor, decided to speak out against the chili pepper on Twitter with a post calling it “obnoxious and utterly irrelevant to our teaching.” She was inspired to push back against the pepper because of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movement.

According to a Twitter post by the RateMyProfessors website, the chili pepper rating was meant to reflect a dynamic and exciting teaching style. However, according to a study published in Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, the scores showed that professors rated as attractive had higher overall teaching scores.

15,000 likes and thousands of retweets later, RateMyProfessor responded and removed the rating option at the request of teachers and students.

Howie Schwesky, a math professor at Pierce, is fine with the pepper being removed and thinks the teachers who reached out on twitter were acting in a fair manner.

“We don’t want anything that implies sexism of any type at Pierce and a professor should be judged by his or her reviews and their teaching methodology, so I see no problem with removing it,” said Schwesky.