Rate My Professor Scraping

Introduction

Rate My Professors is a website that allows students to leave a review on a professor that they have taken in the past. This site also allows people to comment on and review the university that they attended and leave insights as to why they may feel one way versus another. Many students use this site to find professors that they want to take, and professors also use this site to see how students are rating them. By scraping this website I will be able to look at how ratings compare among universities and piece together what scores students are giving universities.

This is an example of what Xavier University’s webpage looks like:

There were a few initial questions that I had that sparked my interest:

• Which university has the highest overall quality?

• Which university has the lowest overall quality?

• How does Xavier compare to other schools?

Difficulties

The biggest issue that I found when attempting to scrape the Rate My Professors cite was that there wasn’t a clear way that they had categorized each university cite URL, so it was troublesome to specify which colleges to scrape. Because of this issue, I hard-coded and analyzed the 12 universities that make up the Big East Conference, and decided to analyze and compare the universities and see how Xavier matched up in terms of ratings.

Analysis

Before going into this, it is important to note that Rate My Professors uses a rating scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest score and 5 being the highest score.

Which schools have the highest and lowest quality score?

rmp %>% 
  select(university_name, quality) %>% 
  filter(quality == max(quality))

         university_name quality
1  Georgetown University     4.1

rmp %>% 
  select(university_name, quality) %>% 
  filter(quality == min(quality))

         university_name quality
1  Seton Hall University     3.4

The highest overall rated university in the Big East is Georgetown, while the lowest rated university in the Big East overall is Seton Hall.

What is the average quality score for Big East schools, and how does that compare to Xavier?

rmp %>% 
  summarize(average_score = mean(quality))

  average_score
1      3.818182

The average score for a Big East school for quality is about 3.82.

rmp %>% 
  filter(university_name == " Xavier University") %>% 
  select(university_name, quality)

     university_name quality
1  Xavier University     3.9

Xavier’s overall score on Rate My Professors is actually slightly higher than the average score for schools in the Big East, which is something that we as musketeers can be proud of.

How does Xavier rank in terms of food in comparison to other Big East schools?

rmp %>% 
  group_by(university_name) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = reorder(university_name, -Food), y = Food)) +
  geom_col(fill = "green") +
  labs(x = 'University', y = 'Food Review Score')

Xavier University actually has the highest Food rating out of the Big East Schools on Rate My Professors, which is kind of a shock to me with how much students here complain about there not being that many good food options (this would be immediately relieved by the installation of a Chick-fil-a in my opinion).

Conclusion

Rate My Professors can be useful for students to see which professors they may want to take classes from (or avoid) but it can also be used to compare colleges based off of rankings from students as well. It was interesting to gain some insights on how students rate the Big East universities on a variety of different things and being able to see how Xavier compares to other similar universities.