Press Release

Making the Grade: Teachers & Professors Beware, Students Are Doing the Grading, Announces The RateMy Network

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Aug. 28, 2001 -- Finally, students are doing the grading! Everyone is aware of the national debate surrounding the effectiveness of America's teachers -- should there be a national standard, what is the criteria, who is to do the judging, etc. ... but no one is asking the people most familiar with the subject -- students -- until now, that is.

RateMyTeachers.com, part of The RateMy(TM) Network, gives students a voice -- a very loud voice -- in the debate about which teachers make the grade and which don't.

RateMyTeachers (http://www.RateMyTeachers.com) was launched on August 23, 2001, and follows the overwhelming popularity of RateMyProfessors, a site which allows college students to offer a public review (and sometimes flogging) of their professors. RateMyProfessors (http://www.RateMyProfessors.com) was launched June 2001 and already received ratings for over 12,000 professors from 800 universities and colleges. RateMyTeachers, despite a very quiet launch, received ratings for 1,225 teachers and 2,245 total ratings in its first four days, revealing the awesome potential of the site.

"RateMyTeachers and RateMyProfessors are a lot more than just entertainment," says The RateMy Network CEO, Richard Coyte. "They can be a source of valuable information. Imagine a freshman registering for classes without any unfiltered feedback from previous students, or parents hearing complaints from their teenager about a teacher but without any direct feedback from other students. It's a nightmare we help students and parents avoid. Of course, both sites offer serious entertainment value for everyone -- some of the comments are hysterical."

Both RateMyProfessors and RateMyTeachers provide a safe, anonymous forum for students, provoking honest opinions. Students search a database by state to find their school, submit their teachers, grade them according to three criteria -- easiness, helpfulness, and clarity -- and post comments about those teachers. After these comments are reviewed and approved, they are posted to the site. Both the ratings and comments are freely available.

"We know we're onto something big -- students and alumni are really responding to these sites," said Coyte. "... even the college newspapers are getting into RateMyProfessors. Our job now is to make the sites as useful and as popular as possible: the more opinions, the more valuable and entertaining the information."