You are welcome to contact us if you have questions about our website after reading this FAQ.
This website is designed for graduate students to write reviews for their academic advisors or Principal Investigators (PIs). Anyone who has been doing research with the PI is welcome to write a review. If you are a student who only takes classes with the professor, you are not eligible to write a review on our website. You can use other websites such as “Rate My Professors” instead. You need to sign up with your university email address (which typically ends with a .edu domain in the US) and log in to write a review.
No, PIs cannot write reviews for themselves on our website. When a user submits a review, our system automatically checks if the user's email matches the email address of the PI. If a match is found, the review will be blocked, and an error message will be displayed: "Permission denied. You can't rate yourself."
No, we do not notify PIs in any way when they are added to PI Review or when a review is written about them.
Once you add a PI to our website, the website admins will receive a notification and review the information you provided. If the information is correct, the request will be approved, and you will receive a notification about the update. The PI profile page will be made public on our website upon approval. Your username will not be displayed on the PI profile history page.
No, we take users' personal information seriously and collect only usernames, passwords, and university-affiliated emails. We do not share user information with any third parties, and we will not disclose user information to PIs under any circumstances. We are committed to protecting our users' personal information to the best of our ability.
First, you can post a review anonymously, and your username will not be displayed with the review. Second, be cautious of the information you include in the review, as PIs may be able to identify the author based on the content. It's safer to share objective facts than personal stories. Our review form provides suggested questions in each aspect to evaluate a PI, and answering those questions is relatively safe.
If you can’t find the PI you just added by searching, that means the PI you added hasn't been approved. Our administrators will review the PI information you added and approve it if all the information is correct. Before it is approved, the PI is only visible to you. You can find the PI on your saved PI page. Please note that, even though the PI page is not public, you can still write a review for the PI you just added. Your review will be public once the PI page is public.
If you can’t find your university in the university dropdown list in the sign up page, it can be because we use a different spelling of the university name or the university simply doesn’t exist in our database. First, you can try to search your university by partial names, like searching “California” or searching “San Diego” instead of “University of California, San Diego”. You could also try searching by abbreviation, like “UCSD”. If you still can’t find your university on our website, please contact us to add your university to our website. Follow the email guidelines to send us a request email. Thanks!
If your review is hidden, that means your review violates the terms of use and our administrators decided to hide your review. If you have questions about it, please contact us by email.
To increase the number of reviews, this restriction has been lifted.
To improve the review quality, we only allow users from the same university as the PI to review the PI. If you have been studying in many universities and have more than one email addresses, consider signing up for a new account using a different email address. On our website, one account is associated with one email and one university. You can’t add more than one email address to an account but sign-up is easy and free.