Why the Student Course Guide is pretty mediocre

Considering the inauspicious legacy of the Student Course Guide, it wouldn't have taken too much for the new one to impress me. All I really want out of a course guide is the ability to easily find information about courses that I am interested in. That doesn't seem like a lot to ask, but sadly the new SCG can't even do that.

The purpose of the SCG is to help people figure out which classes are worth taking without forcing them to hunt down students who have taken them. But having the Registrar's data available is only a small step towards this purpose; it's the course reviews that are absolutely central. Without reviews, there would be little reason to use the SCG instead of the Registrar's website.

Clicking on the "Cool Courses" link, however, reveals that students give A's to far more than 35 percent of courses. Clearly, "review inflation" is a real problem with the new SCG. Call me a cynic, but I don't think that there are that many truly cool courses on campus. The problem here is not one with the review system; the issue is the use of review rankings to determine which classes are "cool." Cool courses are the ones that define your Princeton experience. The list of defining courses is not nearly as long as the list of courses that merit A's under a loose grading rubric.

A lack of useful information to help students make decisions about their courses is a pretty big deal, but it is the least of my gripes with the SCG. The site's developers did a good enough job getting data and soliciting reviews that there is stuff in there that I'd like to see. Why, then, is finding what I want such a pain?

When I first visited the site I found it quite difficult to navigate. Having asked around a bit, I am fairly certain I'm not alone in my dissatisfaction. My friend Pete Genest '07 told me that his "first impression is that the user interface is confusing."

The search box is entirely nonintuitive: by default it searches all text associated with a class. A search for "Politics" brings up a 500-level economics/politics cognate, a host of freshman seminars and two German classes well before listing Politics 220: American Politics. Perhaps searching all fields related to a course is useful, but it shouldn't be the default.

For the most part people know which departments' courses they are interested in. Even the old SCG recognized that the primary way people look for classes is by department, but to do so in the new SCG, you need to notice the tiny link to "Advanced Search" on the search page, click on it and ignore several search options. For so central a feature, this is way too much work.

Another part of what makes the SCG so damned confusing is its inclusion inside Point. I'll never understand why the USG insists on putting everything inside Point — it only serves to make Point more cluttered and bewildering. The end result is that the SCG user interface is really an interface packaged in another, and users have to disambiguate which pieces belong to Point and which to the SCG.

It is an axiom of user-interface design that tools should be designed to the needs of people using them. If the SCG is to be part of Point, there is still a lot that can be accomplished by putting some thought into userinterface design. It wouldn't hurt to have a developer sit down with a "real person."

You might say that I am quibbling about details, that I should rejoice that there is a course guide at all. As someone who has built large web sites on the scale of Point or the SCG before, I can tell you that it is really easy to fix the problems I have listed. That they have not been fixed belies the fact that USG thinks it has provided the students with a working course guide. In truth, a confusing web site is only marginally more useful than none at all. The USG would have done well to spend more time working on the SCG.

All in all, Brian Strom '06 summed the SCG up best: "It's slightly better than asking a random stranger in Frist about a class." There is no doubt that we have made significant progress over the old system, but only because the old system hardly existed.

Avi Flamholz's column appears biweekly.