What is the Penn Course Review?
Help for First Time Visitors to the PCR
Everything on this website is accessible via the navigation panel on the left
side of every page on this site. You can use either the search box or
the browse menu.
If you use the search box, make sure you click the appropriate radio
button below the search box.
If you choose "Search by course code" and a course is found,
you will be brought directly to that course's ratings page. The proper format when
searching by course code is department code followed by course number (e.g. CSE
120).
If you choose "Search by professor/TA," a list of all professors
or TAs whose name contains the entered text will be returned. It's a matter
of preference, but you may find the "Browse courses By Professor/TA" option
(described below) to be more useful.
Below the search box, you will find the Browse courses menu. We will
describe the choices under the Browse courses menu below.
If you choose Browse courses "By Department," a list of all
departments will be returned. If you then click on a department name, you will
go to the ratings page for all courses in that department. Initially, courses
from all semesters are returned. You can use the "Limit results
to a specific semester" drop-down list to limit the results to a specific
semester. Courses are initially sorted by course code. However,
you can choose to sort the courses by any column by clicking on the column
heading. For example, clicking on the "Course" column heading
will sort the courses from highest-rated course to lowest-rated course. If
you click a course's course code link, you will go to that course's ratings
page. If you click a lecturer's name link, you will go to that lecturer's
ratings page.
If you choose Browse courses "Across the University," you
will be able to view the highest and lowest rated courses, the highest
and lowest rated lecturers, and the least and most difficult courses across
the university. The ratings on each of those pages can be sorted by clicking
on a column heading. These pages are analogous to the "Hall of
Fame" and "Hall of Shame" sections in the old Penn
Course Review book.
If you choose Browse courses "By Professor/TA," you will
be able to view a list of all lecturers whose last name begins will a specific
letter. You can then click on a lecturer's name to view that lecturer's
ratings page.
General Overview
The Penn Course Review is a student-run publication that lists the numerical
ratings and general comments for all undergraduate courses taught in an academic
year at the University of Pennsylvania. As an educational resource that publicizes
student feedback, PCR has a long history of being a valuable and influential
guide for course selection. Right now the review is being revived after two
years of having an uncertain future; the last paper copy was published in 2001,
and a previous online edition was discontinued after its domain name expired
in July of 2003. Our hope is that this website picks up where the previous
edition left off, and continues to provide students with an informative, accurate,
and entertaining appraisal of classes at Penn.
A number of functions that were not possible in the book form of the Penn
Course Review are now possible online. On this website you will find browsable
listings of courses from the 2002-2003 school year arranged by department as
well as by professor. You can search for courses by registrar course code,
course title, or professor or TA’s name using the search bar on the left.
As time goes by, courses offered in successive semesters will be added, resulting
in a comprehensive guide that allows students to compare the same course across
different years and different teachers. Individual webpages display the composite
course evaluation statistics, and the “Across the University” feature
displays the time-honored tradition of listing notable courses and professors.
As in the print editions, course ratings, instructor ratings, and difficulty
level ratings are all measured on a scale from 0.00 to 4.00. (Click
here to find out more about what the numbers mean.)
Although a substantial amount of work has been done, this website is still
far from complete. Written reviews, in some ways the most helpful guides to
what students thought of their courses, will be added incrementally throughout
the rest of the school year.
As you browse through this site, know that cross-listed courses are listed
only under one department. Also, “topics” courses, such as 200-level
History major seminars and Pilot Curriculum general requirement courses, are
not differentiated in their course titles.
We hope that the Penn Course Review website proves helpful to all students—whether
you’re choosing courses for Advance Registration or tentatively planning
out courses for the rest of your college career. Feel
free to submit feedback about this website or questions about our organization.
Finally, remember that you can also consult advisors, professors, and fellow
students for course advice and recommendations. Enjoy, and good luck!
The PCR Board
Explanation of the Ratings on the Course Review Website
The University of Pennsylvania course evaluation forms have 7 questions that
students rate on a scale of Poor to Excellent. The top two questions, which
ask for each student's "Overall Course Rating" and "Overall
Professor Rating," are the two main forms of numerical assessment presented
on this website (in addition to a rating that assesses perceived difficulty).
For each course, our numbers represent the averaged ratings of the students
who returned their course evaluations. The ratings for courses with a return
rate of less than fifty percent are probably not reliable, so be sure to check
out the "Return Rate" column on each page of statistics. Please also
keep in mind that the numbers are translations of the qualitative responses that
are given on the original evalution forms: thus, our rating of 0.00 corresponds
a student evaluation of "Poor," 1.00 corresponds to an evaluation
of "Fair," 2.00 to "Good," 3.00 to "Very Good," and
4.00 to "Excellent."
The History and Future of the Penn Course Review
The Penn Course Review was first published by the Daily Pennsylvanian in 1959
as a 33-page pamphlet that provided the only student-written descriptions of
courses at the undergraduate level. At once popular, it was published every
year and rapidly became known as the “course bible,” full of frank
opinions and advice on how students really felt about certain courses and professors.
The full range of student responses were culled from returned course evaluations,
which contained questions on the quality of the course, its difficulty, the
value of the assigned readings and the instructor's teaching skills and competence
in the subject. In 1971 the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education took
control of the publication and produced it for the next 11 years before handing
it over to an autonomous organization known aptly as the Course Review. In
1985, due to a shortage of staff members, the Penn Course Review was not published.
The Undergraduate Assembly responded in 1986 to student concern over the book's
disappearance by funding its publication for the next three years. With this
push, the guide grew in size and started selling in the Penn bookstore in 1989,
where as of 2001, it cost $12.95 an issue.*
Although in 2002 the Penn Course Review developed a web-based version in an
attempt to make the review free and accessible to all students, only about
200 individual course reviews were ever posted. Starting at the beginning of
this school year the Undergraduate Assembly and the Student Committee on Undergraduate
Education jointly announced their plan to revive the Penn Course Review and
have it complete and available online by the end of the school year. This unique
collaboration between two branches of student government has been aided by
the efforts of two students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science,
Howie Vegter and Steve MacCrory, who have made the PCR website their senior
design project.
Right now the Penn Course Review is building a strong staff that will ensure the continuing success and survival of this
important resource. Currently governed by an executive board that includes
members from SCUE and the UA, the Review also has a separate board of divisional
editors in place. It is indeed exciting that this vibrant yearly publication
is finally where it should be: online and available to all.
The Penn Course Review Executive
Board:
Erica Miao
Alex Chavez
Erica Ehrlich
Jason Bortz
Jason Bortz
Samantha Springer
Michael Sheehan
Cynthia Wong
Michael Cohen
Divisional Editors:
Vicki Litvinov
Shannon Meyerhoff
Dominique Low
Esther Hsieh
Eli Hoffman
Sarah Gudis
Ruth McAdams
Rebecca Beyer
Charlene Chen
David Dubbert
Jason Bortz
Guadalupe de los Santos
Last updated
June 23, 2004
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