LSU computer science professor Nash Mahmoud recently launched an app offering an alternative to the popular website Rate My Professors. The app, called Professor Index, aims to revolutionize how college students evaluate and select professors and courses.

Launched in 1999 by software engineer John Swapceinski, Rate My Professors allows students to anonymously evaluate professors based on teaching ability, quality of their courses and, until 2019, their “hotness.” Today, the website boasts 9 million monthly users and has emerged as a leading professor evaluation resource.

According to Mahmoud, however, Rate My Professors is riddled with flaws.

“I realized that the majority of our students rely on Rate My Professors to make their course selection decisions. But when I looked into that platform, I realized it had a lot of problems,” Mahmoud said. “Literally anyone can review any professor however they want and as many times as they want, so it’s really easy to manipulate the ratings of any professor either in a good or bad way.”

Professor Index seeks to remedy this by requiring users to authenticate their accounts by linking them to an “.edu” email address. This precaution, Mahmoud said, allows students to maintain their anonymity while deterring fraudulent reviews.

“We encrypt all the data and apply every measure to protect users’ identities,” he said. “But we ask for the .edu email to authenticate that reviews are actually coming from students. This also allows us to ensure that students only leave one review per professor per class.”

Another potential flaw with Rate My Professors that Professor Index aims to solve is that professor reviews rely on a biased sample size. Mahmoud observes that Rate My Professors users leave either overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative reviews, with no in between. Reviewers are either so enthusiastic that they flock online to write rave reviews or so upset that they use Rate My Professors to vent about their negative experiences.

“We approach that by creating a platform that is more engaging. We try to incentivize students to leave a review even if their experience has been average,” Mahmoud said. “We apply a gamification system that allows students to level up the more likes they get from friends … We find that having this tiny, level-up system actually drives engagement.”

The app also features built-in, AI-generated prompts to encourage users to leave more detailed reviews.

“If a student leaves a review that is short or extreme, we always encourage them to make it more informative,” he said. “With all these incentives — we call them nudges — we try to get students to be more objective.”

Launched on March 14, 2024, Professor Index has surpassed 21,000 downloads and is active at 19 major American universities as of January. With nearly 4,000 reviews, approximately half of LSU professors have been rated at least once.

As the Professor Index continues to grow, Mahmoud hopes to gather more data to determine whether the app has been successful at reducing biased reviews.

“We’re not there yet,” he said. “We’ve implemented a lot of checks, but right now we’re focusing on growth. We’re trying to test as much data as possible across as many universities as possible to make the app better.”