It is a problem that all students must face each term -- deciding which classes to take.
What professor teaches this course, and how does he grade? Who took that course, and what did they say about it? Is it a major requirement? Is it a distributive?
Fortunately for students at many colleges, most of these questions have already been answered for them by online course review systems.
Such systems enable students to look at their peers' evaluations of nearly all classes in a school's curriculum. By sifting through these evaluations, students can then make better informed decisions about which courses to take and which to avoid.
Different schools have approached the problem of creating evaluation systems in different ways. Dartmouth's first system was created online last year by Reid Thompson '03.
"It's basically an online compilation of reviews of professors and courses based on student input," Thompson said.
The system is straightforward and relatively easy to use.
After taking a course, students can go online and evaluate that course by entering input into several fields. The student first ranks different aspects of the class on a scale of one to four before writing a brief paragraph about his or her experience in the course.
Students can look at evaluations by going online and searching by either course or professor. The service continues to attract more users, according to Thompson.
"For Fall term, we received 914 reviews, or about 10 percent of all possible reviews that could have been written. This was twice the number of reviews we've gotten in the past. Overall, we've received about 1,500 hits," Thompson said.
"I looked at what people thought of professors in each class. It was fairly accurate. You can get a fairly wide cross-section," she said.
Although the course evaluation system is regularly monitored for appropriateness, there have been a couple of instances in which reviews have been removed from the site for indecent content.
Nevertheless, the system as whole continues to evolve as its constraints become more and more apparent.
"It is limited by two things: the number of reviews and the comprehensiveness of those reviews. It particularly needs improvement from a customer-service perspective," Thompson said.
As a result, an overhaul of the course review system is about to get underway.
Many other schools use similar systems, most of which are run by independent student groups and all of which are accessible only to students.
Brown, Harvard, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania compile their reviews by asking students to fill out course evaluation questionnaires at the end of each term.
The University of Pennsylvania has an official organization, the Student Committee of Undergraduate Education, which distributes the evaluations.
According to David Caldwell, the assistant to the dean of undergraduate admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, the committee takes reviews at the end of every class, picks certain ones, and then publishes them in book form.
Yale, Brown and Harvard also publish their evaluations in book form.
Andrea Shen, the spokeswoman for the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences, said that this quarterly is considered an essential resource for most Harvard undergraduates.
Harvard, like Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Princeton, also posts its evaluations on the Internet.
Of all the Ivies, Princeton's online evaluation system is the most extensive and is maintained daily by a staff of editors and paid reviewers.
The first review submitted for each class, if it meets certain criteria, is posted online. Although this somewhat restricts student input, all students are allowed to append brief comments to the posted review.
"It's like ratings on Amazon.com," said Savraj Dhanjal, the student course guide director at Princeton.
In addition to providing reviews, Princeton's course evaluation system also serves as a class scheduler and recommendation center.
"It will schedule a student's courses and recommend courses for the student to take next term based upon what courses he is currently taking," Savraj said. "I'd say it's a really important resource. 3,800 out of 4,400 students use it. We really take it for granted."
One common weakness of course evaluation systems is that they are often incomplete and leave out many courses.
In some cases, only a fraction of the college's courses are covered
One Yale student who had used the system in the past said that it was helpful but needed improvement.
"It is very incomplete, in that only one in five classes is reviewed," she said. "I have taken nine courses, and only two of them were reviewed. The system needs to be more complete. It would also be easier if it were online."
A student at Columbia, Nicole Smith '03, voiced a similar complaint.
"It's not connected to the directory of classes, so you have to cross check it. That is something that could be improved," Smith said.
System designers such as Savraj and Thompson are working to solve such problems. Nevertheless, Thompson said that Dartmouth's system compares favorably to those of most other schools.
