Student Assembly's academic affairs committee is spearheading an initiative to open official course reviews to the student body. Students currently submit course reviews at the end of each term, which faculty may take into consideration when modifying courses, though the information relayed is not publicly accessible.
In the absence of a comprehensive course review database, students rely on less formal channels to learn about classes, such as the Hacker Club Course Picker and the Assembly's CourseRank website, which allow students to submit and read unofficial course reviews.
"Hacker Club is good at what it does, but it doesn't have enough data to be useful in the ways that we need it to be," academic affairs committee co-chair Mac Murphy '15 said.
Student Assembly sent a petition for the initiative through a campus-wide email last Monday to assess whether students are in favor of making course reviews public. The petition will be sent to Dean of the Faculty Michael Mastanduno.
Without access to a comprehensive pool of course reviews, students often rely on the advice of a small number of upperclassmen who have experience with certain courses or professors.
An improved system with open course reviews would allow students to learn about a wider variety of courses and would be especially useful for freshmen and transfer students choosing courses during their first term on campus, Murphy said.
The reviews could help students to make informed decisions about their courses by providing more qualitative data, such as professors' teaching styles and types of assignments.
"Looking back to my freshman year and not really having a lot of people to talk to or a lot of knowledge of what other resources were out there, it would have been nice to have a more comprehensive picture of the classes I was taking before I got into them," Murphy said.
Other Ivy League schools have publicly available course review databases. Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania publish official course reviews, while Brown University and Columbia University use systems similar to Hacker Club's Course Picker, although both offer more comprehensive information.
"We're definitely lagging behind in getting these online and getting these available for student use," she said.
The letter to Mastanduno will provide quantitative and qualitative descriptions of student interest to advocate making course reviews publicly available.
The details of the revised system will be determined following the initiative's approval.
Based on her conversations with faculty about the new initiative, Murphy said faculty members have mixed opinions on making course reviews available to students.
Students interviewed said they would appreciate the benefits of an open course review system.
Sara Winfrey '17 said freshmen face difficulties when selecting fall term classes, and that reviewing other students' opinions would have helped her with course selection.
A public database of course reviews would motivate professors to improve their classes, Saaid Arshad '14 said. He added that many students currently contact their friends to collect information about courses, a process which could be simplified by an open course review system.
"The main issue I've had is that sometimes students would just give very inaccurate opinions that are based on a couple of random students versus a general mass consensus," Arshad said.
Students often sit in on different classes during the add/drop period, but public course reviews would add complementary information that is more reflective of the course beyond the first week of the term, he said.
The proposed initiative could offer a wider range of perspectives on course options.
"It would actually show us truly what kids thought at the end of the class, how they felt the teacher was, how they felt the assignments went and how they felt the coursework was, and that's what I think is beneficial," Jordan Kastrinsky '16 said.
