Graded on the Curves

Getting sweet on the teacher is nothing new.

But Boston students looking to up their chances for classroom ogling this fall have a decidedly modern tool to help them pick courses. RateMyProfessors.com—a site that collects student evaluations of profs—is making academics blush with its hotness rating, which encourages those blessed with good-looking teachers to say so. The site’s got reviews on about 7,500 professors in Boston and Cambridge. The hottest? According to CJ’s arithmetic (counting “hotness” votes as a percentage of overall ratings), that august honor falls to Boston University’s Lesley Yoder, a grad student who teaches French (of course), and who earns strong praise from students. “Take anything she teaches,” one gushing poster urges. “Switch your major if you have to.”

Academics, being a serious-minded lot, have derided the site as defamatory, or at least uncouth: One of Yoder’s pupils suggests in a post that she don a certain pair of jeans a bit more often. But Yoder laughs it all off. “I don’t take it seriously or get offended. But then, I’ve got mostly favorable ratings, so it’s easy for me to say.”