How it works
From a search to a structured record.
Discovery, understanding, reviewing and moderation — and why the academic context around a review is what makes it mean anything.
The four steps
Find
Search for a teacher, department, institution or course, or browse an institution's departments.
Understand
Read dimension-level ratings, published reviews, the courses involved and how many reviews the picture rests on.
Review
Signed-in, verified students submit structured feedback about teachers they have been taught by.
Moderate
Reviews are published through moderation, and anyone can report a published review for a stated reason.
Discover
You can start from either end. Search matches teachers, departments, institutions and courses at once and groups the results by what they are, so a course code and a teacher’s name behave the same way. Or browse institutions and work down through departments to the teachers in them.
Understand
A teacher profile is built to be read rather than scored. It shows:
- Results for each question in the questionnaire, grouped by dimension.
- The number of published reviews behind those results, so thin evidence is obvious.
- The individual published reviews, each with the courses it relates to.
- The questionnaire version each review was answered under.
An overall figure is only presented as established once enough published reviews exist for it; until then the profile says so rather than showing a confident-looking average built on one or two responses.
Review
Reviewing is limited to students who have signed in with a verified student account. A review is written against a specific teacher, and the courses that the experience relates to are recorded with it. The form asks the questionnaire’s questions in order rather than offering a free-form rating.
Reviews are not published the moment they are submitted. They enter moderation first, and a student can see the status of their own submissions from their account.
Moderation and trust
Moderation removes content that breaks the community guidelines — abuse, personal attacks, private information, serious unsupported allegations, spam. It is not there to make a teacher look better or worse.
Any published review can be reported with a stated reason. Reports are reviewed against the same guidelines, and a review can be removed from public view as a result.
How the pieces relate
Context is the whole point of the structure. Each layer narrows what a review can reasonably be compared with:
- Institution
- A university, college or school. Everything below it belongs to exactly one institution.
- Department
- An academic department within an institution, holding its teachers and courses.
- Teacher
- A person in a department, with a designation and the published reviews about their teaching.
- Course
- A subject taught in a department, identified by its code, and recorded on the reviews that relate to it.
- Review
- One student's structured answers about one teacher, tied to the courses involved and to a questionnaire version.
Because a review carries its department, institution, courses and questionnaire version, a reader can tell whether two reviews are actually describing comparable situations. That is what a bare star rating cannot tell you.
What is not here yet
The platform today is discovery, structured reviewing and moderation. Institution-facing reporting, teacher-claimed profiles and any analytics product are not part of it. This page describes current behaviour, and will change when the behaviour does.
About covers why the platform is built this way, and Privacy covers what is public and what is not.