The turbulent history of Penn Course Review is currently on the upswing, with the site recently returning from a nearly two-month absence.
The Course Review Web site allows students to search through evaluations of courses and is often popular during advance registration periods, when undergraduates are selecting future classes. Advance registration is currently going on for spring semester.
During fall semester's add/drop period, the server that previously hosted the Course Review crashed, and organizers were forced to scramble to get the site functioning for the spring semester advance registration period.
However, currently, Penn Portal still lists the Course Review as not yet available due to the server change. The registrar's Web site does correctly link to the new Course Review site.
The Course Review received a major facelift this past summer, but "just getting everything running properly" is now the priority of the staff, according to Wharton and College senior David Dubbert, the Course Review editor in chief.
After a previous absence, Penn Course Review was resurrected in online form in fall 2003 with the assistance of the Undergraduate Assembly and the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education. Before last year, the Course Review had been published as a book and had undergone several administrative changes.
Over last summer, Web administrators worked to make the site more user-friendly and helpful, primarily by allowing students to write their own course reviews rather than simply giving the course a numerical ranking.
In the past, a staff of writers would collect students' comments from course evaluations and write one review for each course. Now, staff will monitor students' posted comments.
We "felt that it would be a little bit more genuine if the students wrote the reviews themselves," Dubbert said.
Penn Course Review Web administrator and Engineering junior Erica Ehrlich commented on the more logical structure of the new design.
"Features that the site offers now were always offered before. It's just that people weren't always aware of them," Ehrlich said.
"There are a lot of options on the new site that I think are more intuitive and easier to use," she added.
As far as future improvements go, Ehrlich said that Course Review organizers hope to implement a histogram feature, which would show a bar graph breakdown of individual course ratings.
College sophomore and Penn Course Review user Brian Phillips expressed some reservations about the site's trustworthiness.
"I hope it's not misleading. In the past, it hasn't been. Typically, if [a course] gets a good review, then it ends up being a good course," Phillips said.
Penn Course Review organizers are meeting today to decide how best to make students aware that the service is indeed up and running, just at a new location.
