Students will no longer be able to grade profs by physical attractiveness
The popular website “Rate my Professor” recently discarded one of its longstanding rating features, a “chili pepper” system that measured how physically attractive students find their instructors.
The change comes after a female professor, BethAnn McLaughlin, tweeted at Rate my Professor last week that the pepper system “is obnoxious and utterly irrelevant to our teaching. Please remove it because #TimesUP and you need to do better,” Inside Higher Ed reports.
A subsequent firestorm of tweets directed at Rate my Professor heaped criticism upon the company, with users claiming that the hotness rating “gives male profs the notion that female students want to sleep with them” and that it is “worse than obnoxious and it invites students to objectify professors.”
Rate my Professor eventually relented and announced that the chili pepper would be removed from the site’s rating system.
“The chili pepper rating is meant to reflect a dynamic/exciting teaching style,” the company said in response to the initial tweet from McLaughlin “But, your point is well taken and we’ve removed all chili pepper references from the Rate My Professors site.”
“You did the right thing and you did it quickly,” McLaughlin responded.
In an essay following the controversy, McLaughlin wrote that the removal of the chili pepper “pulled a thorn from the side of women in education,” though she offered no examples of how the pepper rating system had harmed any female academics.
MORE: Students give higher marks to professors who are ‘hot’ and have easy classes
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