Review Policy

Last Updated: August 14, 2026

Jupiterp publishes student reviews of named people. That is worth doing carefully. Everything below applies to every review, and every review is read before it appears.

Who can write a review

Anyone with a working @terpmail.umd.edu or @umd.edu address. That includes faculty and staff, and it includes alumni for as long as their address still works. We do not have a separate mechanism for that, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Write about a course you actually took, with that instructor. A review is a first-hand account, not something you heard.

What we will not publish

Personal attacks. Criticise the teaching, the workload, the grading, the organisation of the course. Do not attack the person.
Allegations of criminal or professional misconduct. Not because such things never happen, but because a course review site cannot investigate them and publishing an unverified accusation can do real harm to someone who has no way to respond. If something serious happened, the university's Office of Civil Rights and Sexual Misconduct and the Office of Student Conduct exist for it, and they can act where we cannot.
Comments about protected characteristics (race, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, age), including remarks about someone's accent or how they speak.
Contact details. No email addresses, phone numbers, office numbers, home addresses, or social media handles, whether they are yours or someone else's. Reviews containing these are rejected automatically.
Links. For the same reason, and because they are what spam looks like.
Impersonation. Do not write as though you are someone else.
Other students, TAs, or classmates by name. They did not sign up to be reviewed.
Content that is not a review, such as advertising, jokes about unrelated people, or test submissions.

What we are happy to publish

Blunt, negative, specific reviews. "The lectures were disorganised and the exams didn't match the homework" is exactly the kind of thing this site exists for. A low rating is not a policy violation, and we do not remove reviews because a professor dislikes them.

How reviews are moderated

Every review is checked before it appears. Nothing is published automatically on submission.

Some checks are mechanical: reviews containing links or contact details are rejected without a person seeing them. Beyond that, reviews may be classified by an automated system to sort out the ones needing closer attention. See the privacy policy for what that involves. Anything that looks like an allegation about a specific person is always read by a human, whatever the automated system concludes.

If your review is rejected

You will be told why, and you can reply to that email to have a person look again. You can also write a new review, which goes through moderation like any other.

Withdrawing your own review

When you confirm your review we give you a management key, once. Keep it: it is the only way to withdraw the review later, and we cannot recover it for you. By design, there is nothing linking it back to you. Withdrawing deletes the text rather than hiding it, and cannot be undone; you are free to write a new review afterwards.

To withdraw a review, paste your key at jupiterp.com/review/withdraw. You will be shown the review before anything is removed.

If you are the professor

You can report any review through the link on it. Tell us which part breaches the policy above and we will look at it. We aim to respond within five working days during term.

We will not remove a review for being unflattering, and we do not currently offer a right of reply — verifying that someone is who they say they are is a harder problem than it sounds, and replies would themselves need moderating. Reporting is the whole of the process for now, which is why the response time above matters.

Your email address

We ask for it to check you are at UMD and to stop the same person reviewing the same course repeatedly. It is stored only as an irreversible hash: we cannot read it back, we never display it, and the professor never sees it. Reviews are not anonymous to us in the sense that we could not tell two of them apart; they are anonymous in that we cannot tell you who wrote one.