As of yesterday, Stanford students have entered a new era of course selection. Gone are the days when students had only the user-unfriendly Axess Web site or erratic advice from whatever upperclassmen they could find to rely on in making critical course selection decisions. Now, students can plan out their weekly schedule, construct a four-year plan, track their GERs and access official evaluation information from other students all in one place: http://courserank.stanford.edu.

Stanford is finally catching up to its peer institutions like Harvard and Yale that have made course evaluation information publicly available for years. Harvard’s famous CUE guide is perhaps the most established, having existed for almost 30 years in its present format. Delivered in printed form to undergraduates in their dorm rooms and made available online, the CUE guide offers student rankings of difficulty, workload and satisfaction with each of the courses at the University, as well as qualitative comments about professors and classes.

Yale has an Online Course Selection application that has similar information available to its students, accessible in the same Web site where students officially register for classes in the upcoming term. These established and widely consulted sources are bolstered by high rates of response on student evaluations at these universities — a recent Harvard Crimson article pegged Harvard’s response rate at 84 percent and put Yale’s in the mid 90s. Stanford’s response rate is similarly high ever since the institution of online evaluations last year, but, until now, the wealth of information culled from this process has only been available to professors and administrators.

The beauty of CourseRank is that its developers, in conjunction with the ASSU, were able to obtain the quantitative information from student evaluations to incorporate into their Web site. Now Stanford students can go online and see how a certain TA or professor scored on a very good/good/fair/poor/very poor continuum regarding all the topics students are quizzed on in their quarterly evaluations. Also provided by the Registrar’s office were composite averages of how many hours per week students spent working on a class and what grade they expected to receive.

The administration was unwilling to release the qualitative comments that students complete as part of the evaluations, but this exclusion is not too big a loss, especially considering that students will be able to post their own comments on CourseRank regarding classes and professors.

Administrators are understandably concerned about the inevitable fraction of comments that stop short of informed and informative critique of curricula or faculty and instead stoop to personal insults that include vulgarities or worse. This is an obvious source of anxiety for faculty, but a compromise has been put in place that should police the site fairly. Students or faculty surfing the site can “report” questionable comments that will be reviewed by the ASSU, and insubstantial comments and ad hominem attacks will be deleted.

This system should be a good way for students with previously few informal channels of information about courses to have access to dozens of comments and ratings that can illuminate their choices. It will also be an easy-to-use way to plan a schedule and avoid those pesky time conflicts between classes. This site is a victory not only for eager students who hunt through the Bulletin for the best classes, but also for University Registrar Thomas Black, who said he hopes that, down the line, even more useful components like syllabi and major requirements will be included.

It is also a reminder of the limitless possibilities and talents of the Stanford student population. CourseRank was not built by professional Web developers hired by the administration, but by three members of the class of 2009 who started work on the site in CS 194, a class mainly intended for seniors developing software projects. Stanford has long suffered with the substandard Axess software, but, as the alma mater of precocious software geniuses all over Silicon Valley, it deserves powerful, comprehensive and user-friendly online applications for its own internal operations.

Now there is one last step: for the Stanford student community to embrace the Web site, entering preferences and ranking classes they have taken in the past. The site will be more and more useful as more students explore and provide input. This gift to the community, negotiated by the Registrar’s office, the ASSU and the CS department developers, should not be squandered by students who fail to use it effectively. Hopefully, with time, CourseRank can have the institutional strength of Harvard’s CUE guide or Yale’s Online Course Evaluations and be just as essential for confused students deciding what to take.