As scheduling week nears, students face the nerve-racking task of choosing the professors that will guide them through the next 15-week semester.The choice could lead to a successful semester or a miserable one.Some students decide not to leave their decision to chance and instead use the website RateMyProfessors.com to get a firsthand review of their future professors from past pupils.“It definitely lets a student know, if you look through it extensively, if a professor is understanding about things or just stubborn and if the class is boring, or if it is actually interesting and you come out of it with something,” Sienna Hollows, a junior psychology major, said March 9 on a bus back from New York City.Hollows philosophy is that with the number of general core classes offered, it is important to “get a feel for the class before.” With 13 million comments about different professors generated on the website, other students from around the world share Hollow’s enthusiasm.Another student, Brittany Harper, sophomore psychology major, finds that her relationship with a teacher is essential for her productivity.“My grade usually depends on how much I like the teacher,” said the sophomore Psychology major on March 12 in French class. “If I can’t focus in on what someone is saying and if I’m not intrigued by a person, I am so flighty I can’t stay focused.”Rate My Professors’ website states on its page that it was created “for college students by college students,” and it boasts a database of over 1.5 million professors from the United States, United Kingdom and Canada.The website rates each professor on a five-point scale in four categories: easiness, helpfulness, clarity and rater’s interest. Additionally, a chili pepper denotes a teacher students consider to be “hot.”“The chili pepper is kind of disturbing,” Hollows said. “It is weird to even have it on Rate My Professor.”Although students such as Hollows find the website useful, the page does exclude one group: the teachers.“I don’t necessarily find it to be really nice,” said Chris Rolinson, Photography professor, while riding the shuttle Feb. 29.According to Rolinson, angry students can predominate the reviews, and that can lead to skewed results.“It is kind of a one-way communication. As a professor, there is no way to [give] feedback,” he said, dismissing the site’s option of professor rebuttal to be unhelpful.Rolinson said he would prefer students come to his office to talk about problems they have with him and his class in person.“That would be a much more effective way to handle it, in my opinion,” Rolinson said.Hollows believes in perpetuating only constructive reviews, to balance out the irrational and emotionally-charged reviews.“I have rated a professor. I have done it most of the time for professors that get a bad rating and I feel like it is because a student genuinely did not do the work and got a bad grade and they were upset about it,” Hollows said. “I want to put it straight that it’s not the professor, it is the student and I always put that in my rating.”Harper had a situation where she was thrown into a class when there was only one class with seats open and the professor’s reviews were less then stellar. Fortunately for her, the reviews ended up being inaccurate.“Rate My Professor said my teacher was horrible and it ended up being a good class,” Harper said.Matthew Ussia, an English professor, cautioned students event about the positive reviews on the website in the library lobby on March 1.“You could have really good reviews but even good reviews should be taken with a grain of salt,” Ussia said.Ussia thinks teachers should be reviewing their teaching strategies persistently and that reviews can be helpful. For some teachers, embracing what students dislike about them could be a teaching strategy, while other teachers may be making classes too easy and catering to students to get good reviews.According to Ussia, it is just a new piece of information to grow as a teacher.While Ussia said he looks at his reviews only every so often as a “lark” and strictly after the semester is over, he has found it useful on at least one occasion.“The best piece of feedback I ever got was on Rate My Professor,” Ussia said.A reviewer mentioned Ussia spent too much of the class talking and not enough time in classroom discussion like he said he would at the beginning of the semester.“It actually did change the way I approached teaching that class again,” he said.All feedback is not always constructive, however.Ussia recalls a female friend who worked as a professor who read a comment that was borderline sexual harassment. The professor was one of many professors who received a “chili pepper” attractiveness mark next to her name.“For female faculty, that’s a really weird dynamic. Being bearded and fat and male, it’s not part of my universe,” Ussia joked.As for recognizing the reviewers, Ussia confirms that it is easy for professors to tell which students left certain comments, even with the anonymity provided by RateMyProfessors.com.“It’s like confession. I mean the screens there but the priest can still hear your voice,” Ussia said with a laugh.