Update Appended
The Student Assembly Course Guide which hosted rankings and ratings of courses at the College until it was replaced with the independent CourseRank service in spring 2010 is no longer available online, leaving students without access to the guide's course reviews from previous years. Although former Student Body Vice President Cory Cunningham '10 told The Dartmouth last spring that the Assembly would work with computing services to make past rankings available, an Assembly representative said she was unsure when the ratings would be placed online.
Several students expressed concern about the reduced availability of information, now that the Course Guide is inaccessible.
"I was expecting to use the Course Guide this week before selecting my First-Year Seminar," Emily Weiswasser '14 said. "Now, with the loss of all of that information about instructors, I don't feel like I have as much help with my choice."
Yi Yang '14 said she was concerned that CourseRank did not offer necessary information to students.
"The new system is not at all as comprehensive," Yang said. "Upperclassmen are always telling me to pick the class based on the professors, but without access to collective knowledge like [the Course Guide,] what am I supposed to do?"
Last spring, The Dartmouth reported that the Assembly's Academic Affairs Committee would work with Computing Services to transfer old reviews onto CourseRank. Rachel Wang '13, spring co-chair for the Academic Affairs Committee, said she was unsure whether Course Guide's rankings will be made available or transferred to the new system at a later date, in an e-mail to The Dartmouth.
Other Assembly representatives were unavailable for comment or did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
Members of the Assembly began considering a switch to a new course review system last year, The Dartmouth previously reported.
"Other peer institutions use [CourseRank], and the system has a lot of different features," Wang said in the e-mail. "We have people to develop it for us, whereas for Course Guide, the people managing it are graduated and not able to be contacted."
CourseRank is a "free planning tool that gives students unprecedented access to information about their classes, their professors and, most importantly, their options while at Dartmouth," according to its website.
Registered students can currently rank and comment on courses they have taken, view other students' reviews of 2,408 previous classes at the College, and rate the accuracy of others' evaluations. The site currently offers 6,619 ratings and 1,076 reviews generated by 1,639 registered users, which have been amassed since the program became available to students in April, according to the website. The site keeps all student-submitted reviews anonymous.
CourseRank includes several features that were not part of Course Guide. The site's online planner allows students to enter their grade point averages each term and keep track of classes they plan to take in future terms. Students can link their CourseRank information with a Facebook account in order to view a list of other users who have signed up for their classes, according to the website. Students can also post specific questions about classes, which can be answered by other registered users. Currently, 13 questions and 12 answers have been posted to the site.
Dartmouth faculty and administrators can also comment on course description pages and view student ratings of their classes, according to the website.
The CourseRank company, which was founded by three Stanford University students in 2007, has three employees, according to TechCrunch blog. In August, textbook rental company Chegg acquired the company.
Students at 176 colleges, including Stanford, Yale University and Duke University currently use CourseRank.
Cunningham is a former member of The Dartmouth Senior Staff.
Update
In an e-mail to campus sent on Thursday afternoon, Student Body President Eric Tanner '11 and Vice President Brandon Aiono '11 wrote that the original Course Guide website was taken down "without [their] knowledge." The Assembly and the College's web team are working to restore it "as soon as possible," according to the e-mail.
