The Professor Lottery: How to Actually Pick (and Dodge) Your Professors

Here's the thing nobody really tells you before registration: two sections of the exact same course, same title, same number, same required reading, can be completely different experiences depending on who's teaching. One professor gives you clear expectations and grades that make sense. The other one buries you in busywork, hands back exams on some mystery timeline, and leaves you guessing what they even want.

So when you're building your schedule, you're not just picking classes. You're picking people. And most students pick that part totally blind.

Let's fix that.

The professor is the variable that actually moves your grade

Think about it. The course topic is mostly fixed. Intro to Psych is Intro to Psych. What actually changes your semester is how the person up front runs the room: how they test, how they grade, whether they explain things or just read the slides, whether they'll help you when you're stuck.

That's the lever. So spend real time on it, at least as much as you spend picking the classes themselves.

How to read RateMyProfessors without getting played

RateMyProfessors is the obvious first stop, and it's genuinely useful, but you have to read it right, because the ratings are noisier than they look.

A study of nearly 8 million ratings across roughly 190,000 U.S. professors found that how students score a professor's "quality" tracks closely with how easy they rated the class, and even lined up with how attractive they said the professor was. Translation: a chunk of that overall score is really a likeability and easiness score wearing a disguise. So don't just glance at the number and move on.

Here's how to actually mine it:

• Separate "hard" from "bad." A pile of "so hard" reviews on a professor who clearly knows their stuff is not a red flag. It might be exactly who you want. "Bad" is different: unclear expectations, unfair grading, never around. Learn to tell them apart.
• Weight the recent reviews. A rough review from six years ago barely matters. People change how they teach. Read the last few semesters and mostly ignore the ancient stuff.
• Ignore the one furious outlier. There's almost always a single scorched-earth review from someone who failed and got mad. One angry voice in a sea of fine reviews is noise, nothing more.
• Hunt for patterns, not verdicts. If five separate people independently say "grades come back really late" or "the exams don't match the lectures," believe them. Repetition is not something that should be looked over.

Look past the reviews too

Reviews are one input, not the whole picture. Stack a couple more on top:

• The syllabus and exam setup. If you can get last term's syllabus, you'll learn more from it than from any star rating. Two midterms and a final hits very differently than weekly quizzes plus three papers. Pick the format you actually survive.
• Grade data, where your school shares it. Some universities publish grade distributions by section. If yours does, use it. It's the least biased thing you'll find.
• Actual humans. Upperclassmen in your major have taken these people and will tell you the unfiltered truth. Your advisor knows too. Ask.

The "easy A" trap

Real talk: don't build your whole schedule around the easiest professor every time.

Sometimes the demanding one is the person who actually teaches you the thing, writes your rec letter later, and makes the follow-up course not feel impossible. An easy A you learned nothing in can easily cost you in the class that comes after it.

So weigh it honestly. For a gen-ed you'll never touch again, sure, take the smoother ride. For a core course in your major, lean toward the professor who'll make you good at it. Easy and good aren't the same thing, and knowing which one you need for a given class is half the skill.

Line them up, then let the schedule sort itself

Okay, so say you've done the homework. You know the two professors you want and the one you're quietly avoiding. Now you've got to fit those specific people into a schedule that doesn't conflict, with backups ready, before your registration window slams shut. That's the annoying part.

That's the part ScheduleLab just does for you. You set your preferred and avoided professors, drop in the courses you need, and it builds every valid schedule that respects those calls, then ranks them so your top picks float to the top. You do the judgment, it does the puzzle.

Pick your people on purpose. It's the highest-leverage move you'll make all registration.

Sources

1. Correlations, trends and potential biases among publicly accessible web-based student evaluations of teaching: a large-scale study of RateMyProfessors.com data · Andrew S. Rosen, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (2018)