In a little over a week, registration for fall classes will begin, and the familiar printed course listings have already popped up all around campus. Attempting to draw up a schedule that fits the block schedule and does not overlap classes is hard enough, but students also have to search for the right courses and professors. Which professor grades the hardest, which classes are easy, and what topics are fun or boring?
For those trying to decide which classes to take, The Primary Source and the Senate hope to answer these questions with their course guides, though who gives the evaluations and what they consist of are rather different.
The Primary Source Guide began a few years ago, but this year the guide will constitute an entirely separate issue from the regularly scheduled bi-weekly magazine. In the beginning, only staff members published comments on courses, but the Source decided to solicit other students' comments three years ago, hoping to broaden the spectrum of reviewed classes. The Source has been chalking, postering, and e-mailing to encourage students to submit to the course guide.
The Source publishes written comments from students, unlike the Senate's course guide, which only publishes numerical ranks. "Reviews in the Source are in plain English - it's the most open student-to-student dialogue on courses," said Alyssa Heumann, production publication manager at the Source.
Comments range from 50 to 250 words and remain unedited, with the exception of correcting grammatical errors. If comments are similar, submissions may be combined to form a single perspective on a course. However, if personal opinions diverge and a class has both positive and negative observations, the Source publishes both, according to Heumann.
The Source guide covers ten to 12 pages, and covered the highest number of classes last year. This year's edition will be out in the middle of next week.
Although the Source course guide is only published once a year, the Senate's Online Course Evaluation Guide comes out biannually. The Senate had intended to publish evaluations by April 16, since the Academic Calendar predicted registration for April 24. However, with registration moved up, members will try to finish the guide before April 9, when registration begins.
The guide publishes the numerical averages obtained from the course evaluations completed at the end of every semester. Written comments in the evaluations are kept confidential despite last year's plea by Dan Zandman, the former chair of the Senate's education committee, to print them. Department chairs made a joint decision to exclude student comments, according to Stephen Levine, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
"There was a concern that quotes would represent extreme opinions either favorable or not," Levine said.
Since student quotes range from overly enthusiastic to strongly negative opinions, professors are concerned that the opinions would not be representative.
And besides, "it would be too labor intensive to put [written comments] up," Abbey Wilson, present chair for the Education Committee, pointed out.
Instead, an interactive forum on the web provides students the opportunity to exchange information about courses person-to-person.
Senior Nancy Phear believes that numerical values can be more helpful, while comments are personal. "It is important to have both. Numerical values grade overall and student comments entail a personal aspect [of the evaluation], but you don't know whom the comment is from and everyone has their personal experience," she said.
Other students opt for written comments. "It's difficult to equate numbers across the board," senior Emily Dasilva said about the numerical evaluations. Dasilva added that the Source evaluations seem more candid and meaningful than the numerical guide, but she would rather ask friends for opinions on classes.
Elsewhere in Boston, students also provide other students with information on classes. Boston University, like Tufts, offers course evaluations towards the end of each semester that assess both the course and the instructor numerically. Unlike Tufts, BU includes student comments in the guide, with five to 15 student evaluations for each class.
A group of students work on what is called the Source Guide. "[The staff] pulls those [quotes] that represent the general consensus," said BU sophomore Raquel Kohl, a member of the Source Guide staff.
Their guide expanded in 1998, when a new group of students decided to augment the number of classes evaluated and the quality of the evaluation. The guide presently covers over 200 courses and was put up on the Web this semester.
Unlike Tufts, Harvard publishes course guides in specialized areas, such as Latin American Studies. The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University publishes a yearly guide to courses in Latin American, Latin, and Iberian Studies, grouping information on courses across these departments.
"When course guides present information from each specialized area of a university, they simultaneously bridge the existing departmental gaps for the course guide user, and allow her or him to plot the best-suited course of study," said Harvard sophomore Carla Denny Martin, an undergraduate intern for the Rockefeller Center.
Although they appear in different formats from separate organizations, Zandman finds it helpful to make both student observations and numerical averages available. "I think the Primary Source Guide and the Senate Guide work together in a helpful way," he said. "I don't think the Source Guide has affected [the Senate guide's] readership. The fact that the site has received over 29,000 hits in it's short existence is testament to that."
On the other hand, Heumann wishes to improve the dynamic of both course guides. "In the future, I'd love to see [The Primary Source Guide] expand, maybe in coordination with the Senate, and have a forum where [comments] could be posted offering advice," she said.
