Staff Editorial: Bringing back the Course Review

For decades, the Penn Course Review guided Penn students through the difficult process of picking classes. With so many overlapping lectures in so few appealing time slots, the book helped students navigate the options and make some safe choices with the help of their peers.

Last year, due to a lack of funding, the Course Review went online. While the Web site only featured certain subjects and completely ignored others, there was still hope that eventually, students would be able to get a second opinion on professors and classes before registering.

Now comes word that there may not be a Web site at all for the 2003-2004 school year. Within three years, the Course Review went from popular to nonexistent, and that is disturbing.

The Penn Course Review was one of the best ways to hold professors accountable for their teaching methods. Without it, the evaluations that students fill out at the end of each semester are for naught, because there is no way to know if their peers shared the same opinion. And in many cases at this school, a good professor makes a good course.

The book's absence is also disturbing because many of Penn's peer institutions have similar publications. Without the Course Review, students are left to select classes based only on word of mouth and the advice of an academic adviser who may know nothing about the student's subject of interest.

Word is the Undergraduate Assembly is making the return of the Course Review a priority for the fall semester, and that is good news. This is a manageable task that would greatly benefit the student body at large, and UA members would be doing a service to the undergraduates they represent by bringing it back.

The Course Review also seems like a good pet project for the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education. A select body of students that has such a large impact on curricula and other academic matters should actively assist in the process of bringing back the Course Review.

Obviously, Penn students can live without a guide to selecting classes. But the benefits of the Penn Course Review are too great to allow it to disappear forever.

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