Gregory Szorc's blog

Benchmarking Academics at Case

In a previous entry I described the procedures to parse all 14000+ course reviews from the Registrar's web site. Since then, I have put all of these reviews in a MySQL database and performed some interesting queries. The results are intriguing. I can now definitively tell you the best and worse of academics at Case. You give me a professor name, I can tell you his average rating from the last fourteen years. You give me a department code, I can tell you the average of ALL of that department's courses fared in a given semester, a given year, from all time. I can compare departments side-by-side. This of course means I can find the best and worst rated departments of all time. The results may surprise you.

I am developing a visual interface to the system (Case username and password will be required to access it). I plan to offer graphical output for about any query you can think of. I'm sure (well, I at least hope) that this benchmark data is already distributed internally among administrators and department heads, but the students don't have such access. By providing this data to any individual affiliated with Case, I hope to provide an easier-to-use interface to evaluate potential course selections and to raise awareness of the exceptional (and not-so-exceptional) professors, courses, and departments at Case.

One of my favorite queries so far is to order the average instructor rating. If you limit the list to persons who have over 400 course reviews for their classes, the list is narrowed to 27 people (some are repeats of the same person (there are different spellings of some individuals-- this goes to show that the course reviews database is internally inconsistent)). I won't give you the order, but I will tell you that the five highest rated professors of all time with more than 400 reviews are: Singham, Ocasio, Butler, Altschul, and Justik.

Until I complete the visual interface, I will be accepting query requests for data via e-mail. I will only respond to requests from valid Case e-mail addresses.

You can ping this entry by using http://blog.case.edu/gps10/mt-tb.cgi/1373 .

I made some minor modifications to the graphical course reviews last night. I updated the individual course pages so the...

Singham, Ocasio, Butler. Somehow this comes as no surprise. I think I will be terribly interested in seeing the results of some of these queries.