25 colleges with the worst professors

This post is part of a series on schools with the best and worst college professors. Read the other post on the 25 colleges with the best professors.

Which colleges and universities have the worst professors?

The upper Midwest is a hot bed for bad professors, according to data an education think tank culled from millions of RateMyProfessor teacher evaluations.

Among the top 25 schools with the worst professors, six of them hail from Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Nearly a third come from all parts of the Midwest.

The pair of schools with the lousiest teachers are service academies -- U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Here's what curious about this -- two other service academies -- United States Military Academy and the Air Force Academy -- earned spots on the list of colleges with the best professors.

The list with the poor teachers is just about evenly divided among private universities (13) and public universities (12). At least seven of the schools focus on engineering, which is a brutally hard major.

25 schools with the Worst Professors

The worst professor list came from RateMyProfessor data gathered by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Every year, the think tank uses these professor ratings when it compiles its annual college rankings for Forbes.

If your school isn't on the list, I wouldn't relax too much. The center only looked at 610 schools. You can find the professor rankings for each of these schools, which include all the nation's most prominent institutions, by checking the center's component rankings scores. Just look for the column with the abbreviation RMP.

[hungaryyu]

I agree with University of North Dakota being on the list. I was a student there and the professors in my department were terrible. I tried writing a complaint to the university, but my complaint was ignored. I feel like some problems could arise because of their failure to accept criticism. I also encountered bullying behavior from many professors in my department and racism towards Americans from several international professors.

[excop1949]

MAYBE IT WASN'T IGNORED...MAYBE NO ONE COULD READ IT...

[rwm4768]

This is such a flawed way to evaluate what college has the worst professors. In no way, shape, or form does Truman State belong among the schools with the worst professors. If you look at Rate My Professor, you'll see that people rate professors more based on how easy the class is than than on how good the professor actually is. At a place like Truman, the professors have higher expectations of their students and make the classes harder.

Does Truman have some bad professors? Yes. So does every college or university. I never had the problem of teachers who couldn't speak English. I had a few foreign professors who weren't the world's greatest communicators, but they were still understandable.

But I find it hard to believe that a school that prides itself on providing good teaching would have some of the worst professors. The people who give the bad ratings are the people who don't try. At some other state colleges, the classes are easy enough that you can get by without trying. But when that same type of student shows up at Truman, they think the professors are out to get them.

This is such a flawed way of determining this. Yes, Rate My Professor is a useful tool, but it is far from scientifically valid. As others have said, anyone can post a rating, and students who hated a professor are more likely to post a rating than anyone else. By looking only at Rate My Professor, we are not seeing the whole picture.

[ElaineUO]

As others have already noted, "RateMyProfessor" is an extremely flawed data source. ANYBODY can go on there and write a review -- you could just lie that you took a particular class and write whatever you wanted. Leaving aside the very good point that often teacher evaluations are problematic to begin with -- the satisfied "customers" often don't bother to complete them, leaving you only with the dissatisfied students' points of view -- this website is particularly problematic. And it really is true that, among students who bother to write a review, there is nearly a straight-line correlation between grade received and quality of review. Students earning higher grades tend to rate their professors more favorably than students earning lower grades. To use this website's data as a source for evaluating professors' **quality** is truly a joke, and honestly CBS shouldn't be giving this "news" any time. (At the very least, CBS should be fact-checking this kind of "data" and setting the "findings" in context.)

[rgh4582]

Personal opinion, using RateMyProfessor.com to determine a listing like this is an extremely flawed and subjective way to evaluate these schools. Seeing Truman State University on the list confirmed this, as most of its negative reviews on RMP are a result of bitter students having to actually put work into their coursework to get their desired grades.

[T_Day]

I'm really disappointed at the negative attitude many of the characters "commenting" on this poll are displaying. I've been a college instructor for 12 years and my experience with RateYourProfessor.com has been that only the students who cared enough about the class to put up with the hassle to enter a review have done that. It's not a user-friendly site and, while it's true that "anyone" could write an instructor/course review, most anyone's won't bother to struggle through the site's data entry and confirmation hassle. Sure, there have been some negative reviews from students, but mostly I've valued the input and asked my students to put more effort into their RYP reviews than the silly stuff the school passes off as an "instructor evaluation" process.

I think any school that consistently gets negative ratings from students on this site should take a close look at itself. Those" bitter students having to actually put work into their coursework to get their desired grades" won't bother to write a rating of any sort.

[crankyoleman]

That's sad. My Dad went to the Merchant Marine Academy back during WWII. They cut out all the fluff courses and he got the basics of marine engineering in about 4 months. Must have been some good instruction. When he retired he was one of only 3 people on the west coast that had an unlimited (horsepower) steam and diesel power license.

[hypnotoad72]

In that top 25 list, NY has more names than MN or WI... maybe the article is mixing up the top 25 with the whole 600+ list?

[cajunvol]

forgot McNeese State Univ

[hypnotoad72]

The bright spot in this article is that it has a LOT of people coming out, describing horror stories. Some with more amounts of detail, but these sorts of articles and responses clearly do show a much larger problem in the making...

[applegirl21]

I can somewhat understand why Western Michigan University is on this list as the school with the most worst professors, because I'm a transfer there and I had a professor my first semester accuse me of plagiarism twice. The second time was after I went to his director. He accused all of his african-american students of plagiarism and he isn't a professor, but just a Grad student. Most of all the professors at WMU is Grad students, which I don't mind as long as they're are good with teaching. The rest of my professors were good, but thats the one issue I had and is currently going through right now. Its just changed my mind, if I should remain at WMU because if it's that easy for a professor to accuse his students of Plagiarism without any proof, it will be that easy to expel a student for absolutely no given reason. I'm a good girl, all I do is go to classes, go back to my dorm room, get good grades and stay to my self pretty much.

[lordanson]

Lots of bad professors in the Northeast. Not surprising.

[Babykin8]

Why? Because the South is so full of great scholars and smart people? LMAO!

FYI-Tea party Snake Handling Churches don't count as institutions of higher education.

[komodo55]

I was quite disappointed to see Central Michigan University on the list. I was a student there in 1975-77 and I thought that the Chemistry and Biology Depts. had some exceptional professors. The same was true of the Math Department. True the Biology Dept. had some old duds, but they were more than compensated for by the younger members of the department. A special tribute to Paul Creighton, formerly of the Chemistry Dept. at CMU. That guy was a "professor".

[spotter77]

I'm a CMU grad too (1999), and that was sad to see. I wrote one scathing evaluation over four years (and still think it was well-deserved), but one bad apple out of some 80 classes isn't too shabby.

As for RMP, it's worth remembering that anybody who wants to can post a rating there. You don't have to have been a student in the professor's class, you don't have to have finished the class, you don't have to even know the person. I've seen borderline colleagues get a pass on RMP and excellent professors get ravaged. I can see why it's useful, I guess, but RMP stats REALLY need to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

(Finally--can I just say that I love how many Michigan-based grads are jumping in to defend their alma maters? It's great to see.)

[excop1949]

Lots of things have probably changed since 1975...and not for the better.