East Carolinian

Issue date: 1/31/08 Section: Features

Most college students at ECU and around the country are familiar with ratemyprofessor.com. Students can go on the site, click on the class they are taking (or are going to take) and see how other people rate a certain professor. Some ratings may be good, some may be bad and some might be so-so, but they are all just that…ratings. Opinions. What if there was a site that gave you some facts about the professor? Like what kind of grades he or she gave last semester? Would that sway students more than ratemyprofessor.com if they had those numbers?

Now, college students all over the country can find those numbers about their professors. Pickaprof.com is a site dedicated to giving students at most universities across the nation a chance to review their professor's grade history. They can see how many A's, B's, C's, D's and F's a professor gave to each class he or she has taught.

Pickaprof.com is a legitimate Web site. It receives official transcripts from the universities that it serves and uses this information to give to students. According to the site, they are the only Web site that provides this service to students.

When you go to pickaprof.com, the site will have a clickable map of the U.S. on its homepage that allows users to click on the state they are interested in, choose the school they attend and then register for the site.

Registration is simple and easy, just plug in your e-mail address, a password and user name and you're good to go. Once registered, students can add a class they are taking or plan to take.

A graph will show up telling you how many students the professor had in their class and the percentage of grades that that professor gave to their students. It also shows the average GPA the students earned in that class.

Other services that the Web site provides to students are Facebook services, a schedule planning feature, a book exchange option and ratings features.

With the Pickaprof's Facebook service feature, students can link their Pickaprof account with their Facebook account and invite friends to sign up for the same classes they are taking. It also allows users to see which classes their friends have signed up for.

The schedule planning feature gives students a chance to build their schedule for the semester in an easy, online format.

Similar to ratemyprofessor.com, Pickaprof also gives students an option to rate and review their professors in the 'reviews, ratings & evaluations' tab. It allows students to give an overall rating, shows the percent of ratings each students has given a professor and a review about the professor.

In addition, Pickaprof gives students a book exchange option, which lets students sell their books online, reserve their books at their university's campus bookstore and gives them a chance to browse through dozens of online bookstores for the best price on their semester's textbooks.

Although ratemyprofessor.com may have given students an advantage in the past, Pickaprof.com certainly offers college students more detailed options now.



This writer can be contacted at features@theeastcarolinian.com.

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