Academics

Three months ago, the Office of the Registrar collected through SCORE 15,521 student responses rating the overall quality of courses on a scale of 1 (Poor) to 5 (Excellent). From this data emerges a complex picture of trends in ratings, with humanities, upper-level and smaller courses receiving the highest marks and quantitative and scientific, lower-level and larger courses the lowest. What factors cause some courses to be higher-rated than others?

Every September, each University professor receives an email from the Office of the Registrar.

The email is an annual grading report, formatted as a PDF document with three rows. The last row displays the grading distribution for each of the courses the professor taught the previous year; the second row indicates the number of A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and F’s given out by all faculty members in his or her department; and the top row shows the University’s grading distribution as a whole.

Every year, psychology and Wilson School professor Eldar Shafir is amused by the semester-end evaluations of his popular course WWS 312: The Psychology of Decision Making and Judgment.

“When some students say that lectures are not well organized, I just crack up. When they are in my class and buying shoes online, how would they know?” he said. “Either they are buying the wrong shoes or having no idea what I am saying, but to think that they can successfully do both is completely wrong.”

I consider the Writing Center an extremely valuable academic help program at Princeton, and I am definitely grateful that I have access to it. But, while I have had several positive experiences at there, I think that the process could be improved. Several of my friends and I who have been to the Writing Center so far this year have experienced a significant problem with the system — the possibility that the writing fellow has little or no experience with the subject material of your paper.

Members of Project Academic Life Total Assessment met for the first time on Friday to set goals and discuss steps to accomplishing these goals, USG president Michael Yaroshefsky ’12 said.