Dear Pennsylvanians,

As of December 2006, I will have completed 39.5 course credits at Penn, and the quality of my experiences fits neatly onto a bell curve.  In deciding on these 39.5 credits, I have often found myself frustrated by the scarcity of available information. Penn Course Review, when it was even functioning during Advanced Registration, never proved to be very helpful.  Choosing one professor over another because he had a rating of 3.7 in a course taught in Spring 2003, while the other had a 3.6 in Fall 2004, never seemed like a sound decision.  When I’d consider my own course reviewing experiences and recall how students often would rush through filling in those bubbles, my confidence in PCR would decline further.   

Readers: Penn can do better.  Students: it is up to you.  Last Friday (11/17), a guest DP columnist wrote an editorial arguing for student online access to course syllabi.  He noted that Penn’s peer institutions have greater accessibility to course materials, whether through links to course syllabi or even global access to course materials, in the case of MIT.

If anyone at Penn wants recognition for implementing meaningful change on this campus, your opportunity is clear.  Create an interactive website that provides real, up-to-date information about courses.  Instead of wasting precious minutes at the end of each class during the first week of December, students could be rewarded with lottery prizes for visiting a single, consolidated website and sharing information about the semester.  For each course, students would assign quantitative ratings and write anonymous vignettes about the professor and the course. Additional website features could include videos of classes, course syllabi, and descriptions of the professor’s background or CV.     

Every year, Wharton distributes a web-based survey to its student body and gives students the opportunity to provide feedback on their experiences within Huntsman Hall.  I doubt the University will release a centralized yearly or semesterly survey any time soon, so if students truly want to make the level of available information reasonable, they themselves will have to take action. 

One student did, and she has received little recognition for her efforts.  Last summer, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler created a website with an index of short video clips of professors who spoke for a few minutes on camera about their courses.  It seems our campus has altogether forgotten about this website (http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~eskreisl).  Eskreis-Winkler pioneered the idea of using technology to enable students to make decisions about courses on a Penn-specific level, and no one has paid attention.  The DP’s lack of mention of her efforts reveals that the site’s attempt to rectify the course shopping situation lacks a space within Penn discourse.  The lack of attention to her website and its goals is a shame. 

As a first step, Penn should enable easy access to course syllabi. However, the entire course reviewing process has the potential to be completely revamped. Waiting for university staff to accomplish this effort is foolish.  Students will have to take the initiative to redesign the process through the creation of a dynamic, consolidated website.  Whoever succeeds in leveraging technology to improve this process will provide a much-needed change to a draconian process.     

In the meantime, overloading my Firefox browser with PCR searches, multiple department websites, and the Advanced Registration site has made me more nostalgic than I’d have thought. 

Happy Course Shopping,

Lauren Saul            

Now Editor Emeritus