Are Top School Students More Critical of Their Professors? Mining Comments on RateMyProfessor.com

Abstract: Student reviews and comments on RateMyProfessor.com reflect realistic learning experiences of students. Such information provides a large-scale data source to examine the teaching quality of the lecturers. In this paper, we propose an in-depth analysis of these comments. First, we partition our data into different comparison groups. Next, we perform exploratory data analysis to delve into the data. Furthermore, we employ Latent Dirichlet Allocation and sentiment analysis to extract topics and understand the sentiments associated with the comments. We uncover interesting insights about the characteristics of both college students and professors. Our study proves that student reviews and comments contain crucial information and can serve as essential references for enrollment in courses and universities.