Sentiment Analysis and Ratings of Professors: A Comparison of Rate-My-Professor and Department Results

Previous studies employing numeric scores have observed that anonymous postings on the Rate-My-Professor (RMP) site tend to be more negative than ratings within a school. In this study, rather than using numeric evaluations, we compared the official UNIV evaluations with the RMP evaluations at the individual faculty course level, employing sentiment analysis on the text comments in evaluations. We compared positive sentiments in ratings on RMP to those in a specific business school department at a university. Our results show a statistically significant difference, with higher positive ratings at the university. We also analyzed emotions using NRC, finding a significant difference, with RMP having higher levels of negative emotions.