Sarah Mcmenamin
Associate Professor · Biology · 8 evaluation records across 3 classes
Sources are averaged by how much we trust each one and by how many records sit behind it, so a handful of reviews nudges the number rather than replacing it.
Boston College's own “intellectually challenging” question — students answer it positively about courses that stretched them, so it measures intellectual challenge and NOT grading, workload or quality. Almost every BC class scores high on it, which is why it is shown as a rank rather than a score. RateMyProfessors separately rates this instructor 40 out of 100 for difficulty — that IS a difficulty measure, but it is about the person across everything they teach, not about any one class, so it is shown here rather than folded into the number above.
Boston College reports workload as one of five bands, not as a number of hours, and it does not publish what the bands mean — so this site will not translate it into hours. Higher means more work, which is not the same as worse.
Ratings from outside BC
Not evaluation dataCollected from RateMyProfessors, not from Boston College: 1 rating, 100% would take again, difficulty 40 out of 100. Difficulty is not a quality signal in either direction — a harder course is not a worse one.
Anyone can post there — no @bc.edu check and no enrolment check — so it is weighted alongside the evaluation data, never above it.
The line
All 13 items · means across 8 recordsBar length is the rank against every comparable record we hold, not the raw score: BC's questions all have a median around 4.5, so a raw-scale bar would be nearly full on every row and would tell you nothing. Every bar is one ink colour — nothing here is graded green or red. The hatched bars are not ratings at all: a higher number on either describes a different course, not a better one.
Class by class
3 classes · 8 sectionsHow each position is worked outPositions account for how many records stand behind each number, so one perfect review does not outrank a semester of them. Every score shown is the real average — only the ordering is adjusted.
4 sections on record · course itself rated 93 out of 100. See the full board for BIOL 5040.
| Term | Sec | Instr | Course | Work |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall 2025 | 01 | 93 | 92 | 60 |
| Fall 2024 | 01 | 94 | 88 | 40 |
| Fall 2023 | 01 | 98 | 93 | — |
| Fall 2021 | 01 | 100 | 98 | 60 |
3 sections on record · course itself rated 88 out of 100. See the full board for BIOL 4050.
| Term | Sec | Instr | Course | Work |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall 2025 | 01 | 93 | 89 | — |
| Fall 2023 | 01 | 90 | 87 | — |
| Fall 2021 | 01 | 95 | 89 | 60 |
1 section on record · course itself rated 78 out of 100. See the full board for BIOL 4500.
| Term | Sec | Instr | Course | Work |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spring 2023 | 01 | 85 | 78 | 40 |
How to read this pageScores are out of 100 — Boston College's 1–5 agreement scale, ×20, the way these numbers were printed for years. Almost every class scores high on that scale (the median is about 90), so challenge and workload are shown as a rank against every instructor we hold rather than as a score; the raw figure is in the breakdown above. Neither describes quality, and neither is ever marked better or worse anywhere on this site. A dash means the question was not reported, and is never a zero. The position printed against each class is this instructor's place on that class's own board, computed from the same records the board itself is built from.