Evaluation of the Surviving Mentor Review Websites
This content was automatically generated by gpt-4o-mini (No human review). The original post is in Chinese.
Let me introduce myself, I am jenny42, one of the founders of the USTC Course Evaluation Community and the creator of the PI Review website. Last May, I had the idea to create this website for evaluating graduate advisors, and after some research, I found that while there are many similar websites out there, they are either paid or barely functioning. There wasn’t a website that truly satisfied me, so I felt it was necessary to spend time creating one myself. A year has passed, and the PI Review website has implemented many of the features I initially wanted, but the number of reviews is still quite low. Today, I want to summarize the existing mentor review websites and promote our site in the process.
Evaluation Date: May 14, 2022
Summary Table
First, here’s a summary table:
| Website | PI Review | YanKong | DaMuChong | MySupervisor | Rate My Professor | gradPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| URL | pi-review.com | www.yankong.org | www.damuchong.com | mysupervisor.org | www.ratemyprofessors.com | www.gradpi.com |
| Fee | Free | Free | Free | Paid | Free | Free |
| Number of Reviews | Few | Many | Many | Many | Many | Few |
| Source of Reviews | User-generated | Imported data | Imported data | Imported data | User-generated | User-generated |
| View Reviews | No login required | No login required | Login required | Paid | No login required | Login required/write 1 review |
| Write Review | Login required | Login required | Login required | No login required/review needed | No login required | Login required/email restriction |
| Edit Review | Supported | Supported | Not supported | Not supported | Supported | Supported |
| Delete Review | Supported | Not supported | Not supported | Not supported | Not supported | Supported |
| Review Interaction | Like/Reply | Like | Like/Reply | Not supported | Like | Like |
| Add Mentor | Supported/login required | Not supported | Supported/login required | Supported/no login required | Supported/no login required | Supported |
| Registration Requirement | School email | Any email | WeChat login | Any email | Any email | Any email |
| Advantages | Comprehensive features | Easy to query reviews | Easy to write reviews | Abundant data | Abundant data | High threshold for writing reviews |
| Disadvantages | Few reviews | Few new reviews | Simple website functions | Paid service | Mainly course evaluations, not research | Difficult to use, lots of spam |
| Language | Chinese, English | Chinese | Chinese | Chinese | English | English |
| Recommendation | 5-star recommendation | 4-star recommendation | 3-star recommendation | 1-star not recommended | 2-star not recommended | 2-star not recommended |
Overall, if you want to write a review, I recommend coming to the PI Review website. If you want to look up reviews of mentors, I suggest checking them one by one from left to right according to this table. I personally have not tried the paid platforms, so I cannot speak to their reliability.
Specific Introduction
PI Review
PI Review is a website I created myself. From May to July 2021, I worked almost full-time on developing this site, spending over 300 hours at that time. I resumed development in April this year, investing nearly 100 more hours.
The goal of this website is very clear: to allow graduate students to write reviews and evaluate their advisors, share information about advisors, and help future students choose their advisors. I have made many useful features to the best of my ability. Currently, the biggest issue is that there are too few reviews on the site, so it may not be very helpful yet. As of the time of writing this review, the site has information on 490 schools, 10,131 advisors, 40 reviews, and 303 registered users.
The website has the following features:
- Search for schools and advisors without logging in
- Easily add advisors after logging in
- Public editing of advisor information, with the site saving editing history
- Ability to follow advisors, recommend, or not recommend advisors
- Comprehensive evaluation of advisors from five dimensions
- Reviews are published anonymously by default to protect user privacy
- Users can edit or delete their own reviews
- Users can reply to, like, and report inappropriate reviews
- Information on the site is always publicly available for free
- Registration requires a school email only
- You can contact us to add your school
- Personal homepages are only visible to the user
- No personal information needs to be entered on the site (except for the school email)
- We do not send spam emails
Currently, all reviews on the site are written and published by users on this site, and no data has been imported from other historical review sites. On one hand, this is due to limited personal time, as importing data takes time; on the other hand, there are other sites on the market that have already imported those historical reviews and are relatively convenient for querying, such as YanKong.
YanKong
Among the websites mentioned above, apart from PI Review and Rate My Professor, YanKong can be considered a relatively useful site. It has a lot of data and allows you to search for supervisors by keywords, school, and department. Most reviews on the site state, “This review is reposted from https://github.com/kgco/RateMySupervisor,” but this GitHub Repo has already returned a 404 error. It seems that most of the reviews were imported from the previous supervisor evaluation site. I personally recommend using YanKong to check if there are any reviews for the supervisors you are interested in.
MuChong
This website’s functionality is really quite rudimentary; the so-called reviews are essentially a template-based message board. University name, college, supervisor’s name—users can write all this information freely, and it all exists in the database as text. The search function can actually search through all the information in these reviews, including the review content. It can only be said that this is the easiest method to implement, and it’s also the simplest for users to post reviews, as they only need to log in by scanning a QR code with WeChat. It can be described as straightforward and crude.
Supervisor Recommendations
The supervisor recommendation site seems to have originated from a platform with numerous reviews of supervisors, but later transitioned to a paid model, which likely means there haven’t been many new reviews added. There is a lot of historical data available, but it requires payment. I tried to check the reviews, and it showed, “Pay 19 yuan to access all reviews for the supervisor’s department.” The specific process seems to involve placing an order to purchase reviews for a specific department, after which an email is sent for payment via Alipay. I personally did not make the payment, so I don’t know what the follow-up would be like—would they send me an Excel sheet, or would I gain access on the website to view the information?
Additionally, I tried this site where you can add supervisors and write reviews, but the reviews need to be approved before they are displayed, and you also have to pay to view them. You can log in, but it seems there is no difference whether you log in or not.
Rate My Professor
This website has a rather awkward positioning; the evaluations of professors mainly focus on the courses, but they are all displayed together. For example, you can only search by professor’s name and not by course name. The overall score for a professor is just the average of all reviews for multiple courses. Therefore, it is not very useful for graduate students selecting supervisors. However, I want to point out that it is also not very helpful for course selection compared to our USTC Course Evaluation Community. The evaluation community has many features that Rate My Professor lacks, such as the ability to search by course name and compare the teaching performance of different instructors for the same course, which is a common need for students when choosing courses—figuring out which instructor’s class is better can greatly assist students in their course selection. Rate My Professor feels like a mix of PI Review and USTC Course Evaluation Community, which can be said to have unclear positioning, making it less user-friendly.
Of course, I can understand the difficulties faced by this website, as it is challenging to obtain course data from all universities. The number of supervisors is less than the number of courses, making it much easier to import.
gradPI
This website is relatively new, and there are very few reviews on it. The founder’s original intention is certainly good, but the product is really hard to use. For example, this website has sent me a lot of spam emails. Not only do you have to log in to see the reviews, but you also must write one review to see other reviews. The restrictions on writing reviews are quite high; you need to link your school email and can only review mentors from the same school, which is understandable. Overall, the experience is not very pleasant, and since there aren’t many reviews, it doesn’t help much.
Other Related Resources
Senior Xiao Chi, Find a Good Mentor
I saw this video on Bilibili: Those Blocked Mentor Review Websites, where Senior Xiao Chi shares the information he has collected and organized. Here are two channels:
I clicked on the resources he shared and saw that they have now created a WeChat public account called “Find a Good Mentor.” After scanning the code to follow, I found that you need to pay 49.9 yuan to purchase mentor evaluations, with a note saying, “Please specify your email after placing the order, and it will be manually delivered within 24 hours.” They also have a mini-program called “Find a Good Senior,” which is also a paid service, basically costing 50 yuan/100 yuan. It seems to be somewhat similar to the mentor recommendation website’s mechanism, where not only do the reviews require payment, but they have also established a consulting service with seniors. I think the resource directory and GitHub Repo shared by Senior Xiao Chi are quite good, but I personally haven’t spent money to experience the paid WeChat public platform, and I’m not very fond of this model.
Mentor Impressions WeChat Mini Program
This mini program seems to have quite a few new reviews available for free. I tried it out, and after logging in with my WeChat account, I just needed to fill in some personal information: school, college, etc., and then I could write a review. The whole process was quite simple.
PhD Kim
A Korean classmate recommended a Korean mentor review website to me, but I can’t understand Korean, so I’m not sure what content is available there.
Some Related Questions
reddit: There should be a “Rate My PI” website…
StackExchange-academia: Is there a “Rate my Advisor” type website?
