ProfRate

The goal of ProfRate is to retrieve and visualize the data on Rate My Professor. For details, please see the website for ProfRate and the Shiny app. The set of slides for this project can be found at this link.

Installation

You can install the development version of ProfRate with:

  1. Install from GitHub:
### install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("m-fili/ProfRate")
  1. Install from local: Download the ProfRate files and use
install.packages("file_path_to_target_package/ProfRate", repos=NULL, type="source")

Note that file_path_to_target_package is the placeholder and needs to be replace by the correct relative path on your machine.

Example

This basic example shows you how to retrieve and visualize the data using ProfRate.

### Load library
library(ProfRate)

The function get_tid gets teacher IDs and general information by name, department, and university. The name must be as accurate as possible to filter the results and speed up. All inputs are case insensitive and support partial input.

name <- "Brakor"
department <- "Biology"
university <- "California Berkeley"
get_tid(name = name, university = university)
get_tid(name = name, department = department, university = university)

The function get_url gets URLs by name, department and university. It use get_tid inside, so it follows the same requirements as get_tid for inputs.

get_url(name = name, university = university)
get_url(name = name, department = department, university = university)

After getting the URL for a professor by name, department, and university, we can use the URL as input for other functions, which avoids scrapping the website multiple times.

The function general_info extracts general information for an instructor. It is used in get_tid to generate the output tibble.

url <- "https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=2036448"
general_info(url)

The function get_all_schools find the university URL using its name. It is used in get_tid to filter the search result. Although further analysis of a specific university is possible, it is not our main interest for ProfRate.

get_all_schools("Iowa State University")

The function comment_info extracts information on comments, including course, year, comments, number of thumbs-ups, and number of thumbs-downs.

comment_info(url = url, y = 2018)

The function sentiment_info uses comment_info to provide positive and negative words extracted from comments and tags from the website.

sentiment_info(url = url, y = 2018, word = "Negative")

The function sentiment_plot uses sentiment_info to generate a wordcloud.

sentiment_plot(url = url, y = 2018, word = "Positive")

The function ratings_info shows and summarizes all rating information for an instructor.

ratings_info(url = url, y = 2018)

The function ratings_plot uses ratings_info to create a box plot of all ratings and 3 bar plots of average ratings by course, grade, and year for an instructor.

ratings_plot(url = url, y = 2018)

The function runExample runs the Shiny app.