RateMyProfessors.com is the primary website where students rate professors across North America, including virtually every Canadian university. The platform has operated since 1999 and contains millions of student-submitted reviews rating professors on clarity, helpfulness, and course difficulty. Students assign numerical ratings and leave written comments about specific courses and teaching styles. The site indexes professors by institution, department, and course code, making it easy to search before registration. Most reviews include tags like "tough grader," "skip class, you won't pass," or "amazing lectures" that give quick context. The platform generates aggregate scores, so you can compare professors teaching the same course at institutions like University of Ottawa, Carleton, or Ryerson. Canadian alternatives exist but have far less traction. Some universities run internal course evaluation systems, but those rarely publish results publicly. A few schools experimented with proprietary rating platforms, though student adoption remained weak because everyone already uses RateMyProfessors for cross-institution comparison. From a web design perspective, RateMyProfessors succeeds because it solved a specific search intent: students want unfiltered peer opinions before choosing sections. The UX is straightforward, search is fast, and the content is user-generated at scale, which means minimal operational overhead once the platform reached critical mass. The business model runs on advertising, not paywalls, keeping the barrier to entry zero. The main criticism is selection bias. Students with extreme experiences (very positive or very negative) review more often than those with neutral impressions, skewing scores. Professors teaching required courses in large programs accumulate hundreds of reviews, while niche electives might have three total. Some institutions discourage its use, arguing it lacks academic rigor, but students continue relying on it because official alternatives don't provide the candid, peer-level feedback they want when planning their schedule. Ottawa SEO has worked with education clients who monitor their RateMyProfessors presence the same way businesses track Google reviews. Reputation matters, and professors with consistently poor ratings sometimes adjust teaching methods or at least understand student perception gaps.