Students looking for the perfect course load for winter quarter now have a variety of online sources for information on classes and professors. At the beginning of this quarter, student evaluations available through Axess and CourseRank allowed more than 3,000 students to make informed decisions about their classes.

Although course evaluations on Axess have been available since last year, Jackie Charonis, assistant vice provost for student affairs and senior associate for the University Registrar, said the site is completely different now from its original version last year.

“Essentially, for students, all the information that is available now wasn’t there before,” Charonis said. “Fortunately, the provost made the decision this year to allow students to see the evaluations by other students and the quality of their courses and professors.”

However, written student comments about their instructors have not yet been published on the site.

“For now, no one has made the decision to share that information with anyone beyond that specific instructor,” she said. “We think it is private information from the students to their respective professors.”

Charonis added that the University was pleased with high student response in evaluations last quarter. About 86 percent of students filled out the online forms in December.

The number of students and faculty who reviewed the site was so overwhelming before winter break that we needed to talk to our vendor to increase the number of people that could log in simultaneously,” she said. “And since this happened for the first time, I have to attribute it to student involvement.”

With so much input given last quarter and other years, students are also taking advantage of the tabulated results published three days after the Dec. 16 deadline for evaluations on Axess. Many students said that they found the results to be helpful.

“I liked using it,” said Andrew He ‘09. “I didn’t choose my classes based on it, but I did feel more secure about the classes that I picked, based on the information that I could see.”

Although many students used the Axess site, some said they felt it could be improved upon.

“They could have changed the online version, instead of using the same format as the paper version,” said Xavier Gaeta ‘09. “The information wasn’t hard to find, but the site could have been redesigned in a better way.”

In addition to Axess, students can also access evaluation results on CourseRank. Started by three juniors for a CS 194 project last year, the site, which also includes user-written comments, has expanded from its initial 800 users to over 3,500 users in the past month.

“The important thing for us was to get a big mass of users to show that it was something useful and meaningful in the world,” said co-founder Filip Kaliszan ‘09.

He said that from the site’s launch in December to the beginning of winter quarter, the average daily number of users was about 400. In the last four days, however, the site has experienced increased traffic.

Charonis said that CourseRank and Axess were not in competition with each other, but rather in a partnership.

“They provide important things for two different groups of people,” she said. “We are excited what CourseRank does for students in giving them choices, and at the same time Axess provides information to instructors and meets faculty needs.”

Kaliszan agreed that the University has been supportive of the CourseRank project since its growth.

“We are providing a nicer interface with more functionality with data that students need to plan their courses,” he said. “For that, the University is cooperating and trying to get their information to us.”

Many students appreciated the additional features CourseRank provides, including advanced planning and scheduling tools. Others hoped to see more students participate in class evaluations.

“It would help if more people joined,” said Vincent Wu ‘09. “When data like grade-distribution bars are composed of three people, it is hard to learn anything about the class.”

Charonis and Kaliszan said they are currently looking into ways to enhance their respective sites.

“We are always looking for ways to improve the system because technology constantly provides us with new opportunities,” Charonis said.

Kaliszan said to look forward to additional CourseRank features in the near future.

“We have a whole list of new ideas in our heads,” Kaliszan said. “Something a lot of people have requested is to have a feature that will tell students what classes they are missing to fulfill their specific major. We can’t make any promises about that right now, but we are looking into it.”