This week, Buzzfeed reported that RateMyProfessors.com was dropping its "hotness" rating for professors after an outcry from female professors who said that the rating was sexist.

RateMyProfessors was right to do so; professorial competence and perceived attractiveness have nothing to do with one another. The rating also disadvantages women, who are too often pressured to conform to absurd beauty standards, even in a professional setting where men wouldn't feel the same pressure.

But this week's news really baffled me, not because I fail to understand how sexism works, but because until this week I thought that "hotness" referred to how exciting a particular class was. Throughout my college years, I used RateMyProfessors.com to choose undergrad classes, all the while thinking a professor with a chili pepper gave... invigorating lectures. (I promise, that's not a euphemism.) I mean, you're rating professors with chili peppers! Chili peppers mean spiciness and excitement, not sex appeal! Right?! Right, guys? Back me up here!

Unfortunately, after asking around this week, it appears that no one else at Ars had been similarly confused.

All of this has me reassessing my collegiate experience. It's weird to think back to the classes I took, expecting that they would be extremely exciting because the professor in question had a chili pepper. Several of these classes let me down on excitement, but a decade later it's difficult to remember if my disappointment was also accompanied by a good-looking teacher.

What makes me sad is the thought of those classes I didn't take because I feared they would be dull (not spicy like a chili pepper ugh RateMyProfessors.com, who made that call?!). It now turns out that I may have passed up amazing classes simply because the professor was considered "not good looking" by a bunch of 19-year-olds whose closest brush with sex was probably smelling the cashier's body spray at the local Hot Topic.

If I have to defend my past self for such naïveté, I would offer that I entered college at 17 from an all-girls Catholic high school where the handful of nuns and God-fearing laypeople who made up the faculty had never been subject to that line of inquiry in my mind. By the time I reached college, my attitude towards all teachers was to approach them as if I were approaching a minor deity—only do it very rarely, try not to look them in the eye, and maybe they'll let you pass the class.

This is a long way of saying "good riddance" to the chili pepper. It was sexist. It was juvenile. And it was a confusing user experience—to at least one person.

It's been a decade since I've used RateMyProfessors for anything, but I hope today's students are now using the site to tell each other which teachers are the best, most mind-opening academics in their fields. But if they aren't, then they will now have to work a tiny bit harder to find the professors they want to gawk at for the rest of the semester.