<p>Do the ratings on Penn Course Review reflect the averages submitted by all the people who "returned" the course evaluation for that class?</p>
<p>thanks!</p>
<p>that is correct</p>
<p>which is why the number of students is listed</p>
<p>I strongly encourage you to talk to your pre-major and peer advisors about the profs. Do not just rely on the numbers.</p>
<p>do you mean to say that the ratings aren’t an accurate indicator of the prof’s quality? I was lead to believe by some other threads i found here that the ratings on the site were pretty good because of its methodology. </p>
<p>How often do the ratings on the website correspond to the actual experience you have with the class/professor? Specifically the ratings for quality of course/professor, and especially the ratings for work load and difficulty</p>
<p>I remember being told by the former OPIM undergraduate advisor that the PCR scores are fairly accurate. It is obviously best to ask former students who had the professors their opinions because they have experience with the prof’s teaching. I’m not quite sure how well a premajor advisor will be because most will not know professors outside of their departments and also will not know how well another professor teaches.</p>
<p>In my experiences, the ratings are fairly accurate. Keep in mind, you need to take them with a grain of salt. If less than 50% of students are returning most of the ratings, that means that half of the kids stoped showing up to class for whatever reason, meaning that either the professor isn’t too great, or that they put everything online and you never need to go to class. Usually though, good professors tend to get above 3.0 on their ratings and bad ones tend to get bellow 2.0 on their ratings.</p>
<p>If you find a professor with a 3.5 or higher rating, he is probably awesome, but make sure to look at the specific course. If you’re taking PSCI110 and your professor has a 3.7 rating but for PSCI598, then you might need to do some more searching, since a graduate seminar (598) is a much different dynamic from an intro lecture (110). Some professors don’t do particularly well in the intro dynamic even if they’re great profs!</p>
<p>Also be careful of the rate of return. In the Spring of 2009, students had to submit the online course review, which takes out that helpful factor of rate of return. Any ratings from Spring, 2009 will not reflect how many students went to class or were interested in doing the survey; if we didn’t fill out the survey we couldn’t see our grades. For courses before then, the rate of return is a GREAT factor, as you could tell that if a prof had 19 out of 150 return the rating, he probably didn’t have the most engaging of all lectures!</p>
<p>To azn4eyes00 (and others):</p>
<p>It is not so much that the numbers are not an accurate reflection of profs’ abilities (or the lack thereof). Some profs only have ratings from a couple of different classes; some profs have ratings that range from 1.00~3.00; some ratings are supplied by only a handful of students. Whichever the case, one does not need Statistics 401 to know that there is simply not enough information (i.e. sample space, population, etc.) to draw conclusions, accurate or otherwise.</p>
<p>As a human being, I do not suppose you would like to be treated as a number that ranges from 0 to 4. I believe that it is respectful, and perhaps most helpful, if you know how a certain prof is seen by his/her collegues.</p>
<p>Also realize that you are not an “average” Penn student in every way. For example, OPIM 101 has really difficult reviews and people generally think STAT 102 is slightly easier than STAT 101. In my case, however, I’m already familiar with a number of programming languages and MS Excel so OPIM was a breeze. On the other end, I thought I wouldn’t have a hard time in STAT 102 since I did well in STAT 101, but we got a lot of homework and weekly quizzes in 102 and that brought my grade down (I’d rather cram all-night before an exam than do work every week). For another example, my LGST 210 professor had really, really, really low “amount of work” and “difficulty” ratings, so I figured it would be an easy A. In reality, we didn’t get any homework - which explained the low ratings - but she gives everyone B’s and only a couple A’s. Also, she played favorites like crazy, but people didn’t care when they submitted their reviews because they didn’t have any homework, and perhaps they were all happy with an easy B.</p>
<p>Moral of the story: it’s a little more complicated than you might think.</p>
<p>theoneo, who was your LGST210 professor and when did you take the course? I’m curious! I think I know who you’re talking about.</p>
<p>haha i think i know which lgst 210 professor is being referenced, too</p>