Faris Mismar Rate My Professor

Reading a RateMyProfessors Page Actually Takes Some Skill

Most people treat sites like RateMyProfessors as if they're objective truth. They're not. A page full of four-star ratings and harsh complaints can tell you a lot, but only if you know how to separate the signal from the noise. I've spent years watching students make decisions based on nothing more than a headline rating and a handful of dramatic reviews. It rarely goes well for them. When I first looked up Faris Mismar Rate My Professor back when he was teaching at Temple University's Fox School of Business, I went in expecting the usual chaos. What I found was something more useful, if you actually read the reviews critically rather than just glancing at the numbers. The key is understanding what each data point on the page is actually telling you, and what it's hiding.

Faris Mismar Rate My Professor — What the Numbers Mean

Take the overall rating, for instance. A 4.2 out of 5 looks solid on paper, but here's the part nobody mentions: the sample size matters enormously. A 4.2 based on 80 reviews is a much stronger data point than a 4.2 based on 12 reviews. When the count is low, one bitter student who got a B can drag the average down by half a point. You've probably seen this happen. One person writes a three-paragraph rant about how the professor "hates students" because they didn't accept a late-paper-extension request, and suddenly your target rating drops noticeably. The difficulty rating is another number that gets misread constantly. On RateMyProfessors, the scale runs from 1 to 5, where 5 is the hardest. A professor rated 2.8 difficulty might sound easy, but that doesn't necessarily mean the course is a breeze. It often means the workload is reasonable or the grading is transparent. Faris Mismar's difficulty rating in the 2.5 to 3 range on various courses reflected something I found consistent across his teaching: clear expectations, fair exams, and workloads that matched what you'd expect from an upper-division business course. That's not an easy class. It's just not an unexpectedly brutal one, which is a meaningful distinction. The "would take again" percentage deserves scrutiny too. In my experience, this metric skews high for professors who are organized and predictable, even if students don't necessarily love them personally. Mismar's "would take again" numbers sat in the mid-70s to low-80s range across his courses, which is above average for business school faculty. That tells you something real: students who took his courses generally felt it was worth their time, even if the material was challenging.

How to Actually Use These Reviews Without Fooling Yourself

The most practical approach I've found is to ignore the single most dramatic review and the single most glowing review on any given page. Both are usually outliers written by people who had a very specific experience that doesn't represent the typical student. What matters more is the pattern across the middle 60 percent of reviews. I've found that reading between the third and seventh reviews alphabetically tends to give you the most representative picture, assuming there are enough reviews to work with. Look for recurring themes. If three or more unrelated reviewers mention that the professor grades on a curve, uses a specific textbook, or expects you to attend office hours, those details are worth taking seriously. If ten reviewers all describe the same exam format, that's not speculation — that's data you can use to prepare. I remember specifically reading that Faris Mismar's finance courses relied heavily on spreadsheet-based problem sets and that midterm and final exams were calculation-heavy rather than essay-based. Multiple independent reviews confirmed this, and I can attest that it held true. Students who came in expecting discursive, theoretical questions were the ones who wrote negative reviews later. There's also a subtlety most people miss about timestamp relevance. Reviews from more than four or five years ago may no longer reflect how a professor teaches. Teaching styles evolve. A professor who was strict and lecture-heavy in 2016 might have shifted toward discussion-based classes by 2022. When I was checking Faris Mismar's pages, I made sure to weight recent reviews more heavily, particularly any from the last two academic years. Older reviews still have value, but they're less reliable for immediate course-selection decisions.

A Specific Problem I Ran Into and How I Worked Around It

Here's the edge case that almost cost me. A few years ago, I was helping a student choose between two sections of an intermediate finance course. One section was taught by Faris Mismar and had a 4.0 overall rating with 92 percent would-take-again. The other section had a 3.7 rating but seemed similar on paper. The high-rated section looked like the clear choice, right? Except the 4.0 rating came from a page that was barely a year old, and the reviews were overwhelmingly from first-time-takers who hadn't taken the prerequisite material seriously. When I dug into the actual text of the most detailed reviews, I noticed something: several mentioned that the course moved extremely fast and assumed prior comfort with financial modeling. The student in question was retaking the prerequisite and wasn't confident with Excel-based finance work yet. Taking the highly-rated section would have been a mistake. The workaround was straightforward. I pulled up the syllabus for both sections directly from the university's course portal rather than relying on RateMyProfessors at all. The syllabus for Mismar's section listed specific prerequisite competencies and included a practice problem set that was genuinely difficult for someone without solid modeling fundamentals. That document told me more in five minutes than the entire review page ever would. The other section's syllabus showed a more gradual ramp-up. We switched to the lower-rated professor, and the student did well. The RateMyProfessors page wasn't wrong — it was just incomplete.

Common Pitfalls That Trip People Up Every Time

One of the biggest mistakes I see is treating RateMyProfessors as a substitute for talking to actual students who took the course recently. The reviews are static snapshots. They don't capture nuance like how the professor handles accommodations, how responsive they are to email, or whether their grading is consistent across different types of assignments. I've had students tell me after the fact that a professor they avoided based on a bad review was actually one of the most supportive instructors they had, once they committed to attending office hours and following the professor's preferred study approach. Another trap is assuming that a low rating always means a bad professor. Sometimes it means the professor is challenging but fair, and the students who give low ratings are the ones who didn't put in the work. Conversely, a five-star rating can come from a professor who gives easy A's and minimal learning. For upper-division business courses like the ones Mismar teaches, you usually want someone in the 3.5 to 4.5 range with a difficulty rating above 3. That combination tends to indicate a professor who maintains standards while still being accessible and organized. Let me be blunt about the limitations of this entire approach. RateMyProfessors data is self-selected and skewed. Students with extreme experiences — whether positive or negative — are far more likely to leave reviews than students who had a perfectly adequate semester. The platform also has no verification system, so anyone can write a review under any name. Anonymous bias is real and documented. A professor who challenges students to think critically will naturally accumulate more complaints from students who prefer passive learning, and those complaints tend to be more emotionally charged than positive reviews, which skews the visible narrative downward.

If you're trying to make a decision about a specific course, the most reliable method I've found is combining the RateMyProfessors overview with three other sources: the official syllabus, a conversation with a student who took the course in the last two semesters, and the department's learning outcome documentation. None of these alone is perfect. Together, they're substantially better than any single data point. The Faris Mismar Rate My Professor pages themselves are reasonably well-maintained and reflect a professor who was consistent in his approach across multiple courses and semesters. But consistency isn't the same as suitability for every student. A course that works well for someone with strong quantitative foundations and self-directed study habits might be difficult for someone who needs more structured guidance. The reviews can help you figure out which category you fall into, but only if you read them carefully and don't stop at the star ratings. For what it's worth, I still recommend checking these pages before enrolling, but I treat them as one input among several rather than the final word. The professors who get the most useful reviews are the ones whose expectations are clear and whose grading is transparent — and by that measure, Faris Mismar's pages tended to reflect exactly that kind of teaching style. The students who succeeded in his courses were generally the ones who showed up prepared, did the problem sets before the exams, and didn't treat an upper-division finance class like an elective.