The staff of the ASSU Online Course Guide is scrambling to revive its outdated Web site. The site was not updated last year, due to mismanagement and lack of accountability by the student group that administered it.

The Course Guide is meant to provide students with helpful information about Stanford courses, by compiling student comments, ratings and useful statistics for a wide variety of courses. It is allotted $11,000 from special fees funds, with $3,000 going to the Course Guide director and $5,000 to other staff members. Though the program has received special fee funding for several years, it has not been updated since 2002.

But this year, the Course Guide staff is making an effort to remedy the situation. Student workers had entered 40 percent of the data necessary for a completed Course Guide as of Sunday night.

“In terms of all of the work that needs to be completed, the only thing we have left is manually entering all of the comments into our database,” said junior Avichal Garg, the financial manager of the project. “All of the sorting, summarizing and picking of representative comments has been completed.”

Garg attributes the site’s outdated state to issues that arose in last year’s administration of the guide.

“There’s a big backlog in comments because, for whatever reason, last year’s management didn’t take an active role in updating,” said Garg. “They chose not to do a large portion of the updating, so we have comments as far back as 2002 that just sat around last year.”

According to the previous Course Guide director, Curtis Spencer, Class of 2003, the only updates that occurred last year were comments for tech courses, due to the team’s strong connection with the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, which assisted the team with the data. Spencer also cited managerial and technical problems as contributing factors.

“Three information editors packed their bags and didn’t do anything,” Spencer said. “There are still two or three boxes of comments that are missing from them. Everything stopped in the spring, and they ceased to care. Axess also changed its system, and it left us scrambling to change our system and format.”

Although 800 comments were entered on Sunday night, the team has received complaints about the lack of comments for many social science and humanities courses. Garg insists that this problem stems from a shortage in student comments in course evaluations.

“On average, we receive far fewer student comments in the ‘fuzzy’ departments than we do in the ‘techie’ departments,” Garg said. “We may only have five or fewer comments for a given political science class. Based on one or two comments, we cannot justify summarizing a class. Thus, there are entire classes that have never had any comments in the Guide. There is just not enough student input for these classes for us to be able to enter anything.”

The group gets these comments from the registrar about three weeks into the following quarter. There are five data entry personnel who are paid $12 to $13 an hour to sort, read, summarize and pick the comments for the Web site.

“There isn’t really any pattern to what has and has not been updated on the site,” Garg said. “It comes down to which employees have entered their data after sorting and summarizing it. Whichever stacks of classes these individuals were assigned are the ones that are updated.”

The team is aiming to finish updating the guide by the end of the quarter, with the addition of a redesigned Web site and improved user interface. The team will also spend $2,000 on an advertising campaign to inform the Stanford community when the guide is completely updated.

“We know that the guide is a valuable service to students, and we will do whatever it takes to make sure it gets updated,” said junior Josh Shipp, the ASSU Senate chair. “There needs to be more accountability and institutionalization.”

The Course Guide is an ASSU service project, meaning it is now an independent project run by its own student staff, like the Speakers Bureau and Stanford Concert Network. The lack of communication between the executive branch and the Course Guide team is illustrated by the fact that Shipp has been unable to contact the Guide director this year. He put a hold on the Course Guide account on Monday until he could speak to the staff. The full $11,000 is still in the account.

“I tried to use the guide last year to figure out which professors would be best, but in most cases, the classes I was looking for didn’t have listings,” said sophomore Lauren Schneider. “However, I just checked out the guide again for scheduling this quarter’s classes and it seems to be easier to navigate with more helpful comments listed, so I guess they’re working towards improving the system to be more useful to students.”