When you're trying to decide whether to take a course, the site RateMyProfessors.com can provide useful information about how effective or challenging a professor's teaching is. And while you're doing that, you might also learn about that professor's "hotness." In addition to rating professors' "overall quality" and "level of difficulty" and adding tags like "tough grader" and "amazing lectures," students have been able to award professors chili peppers for physical attractiveness. The site has even released an annual list of its hottest professors.

Understandably, some professors have taken issue with this, BuzzFeed reports. While this feature isn't gender-specific, female professors in particular have pointed out that it could compound the undue focus on appearance they already face. Vanderbilt University neurology professor BethAnn McLaughlin started this conversation with a tweet reading, "Life is hard enough for female professors. Your 'chili pepper' rating of our 'hotness' is obnoxious and utterly irrelevant to our teaching. Please remove it because #TimesUP and you need to do better."

Other professors soon chimed in to express their dissatisfaction with the "hotness" ratings.

"Some of my friends who had taught previously and meet the criteria for quote-unquote hotness... that's not always a badge of honor," McLaughlin told BuzzFeed. "They're often targets of comments about how they look and how they dress, and it undermines their credibility." She added that this has been an issue for professors of all genders. "What I'm hearing now through Twitter, which I wasn’t aware of before, are male colleagues saying, 'I don't want my students to even consider how sexually attracted they are to me,'" she said. "It makes for horrible dynamics, for power differentials, and feeling awkward."

After the discussion took off on Twitter, RateMyProfessor responded to McLaughlin's tweet, saying that the "hotness" rating was about teaching style rather than physical attractiveness. As BuzzFeed points out, though, RateMyProfessors' account has tweets that indicate otherwise, including a retweet of a photo of Ariana Grande making a disgusted face with the caption, "How I feel about professors who get a hot chili pepper on @ratemyprofessor but aren't attractive..."

The account also said that they'd removed the "hotness" ratings from the site.

Academics including McLaughlin celebrated the change, with many seeing it as a necessary step in the fight for women in academia and elsewhere to be taken seriously.

Related: Students Overwhelmingly Prefer Male Professors

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