Previous Peer Pressure Is Motivating Professors to Podcast Their Lectures |
Next |
September 17, 2008, 12:12 PM ET
Yale Student Creates Grade-Predicting Web Site
Instructor-review Web sites like RateMyProfessors.com are nothing new for today’s tech-savvy students. But even though online rants and raves can suggest which courses to take and which to avoid, they provide users with only a vague idea of how they would fare in a particular course. Until now.
A new site created and maintained by a Yale undergraduate is about to take online course shopping one step further. The site, Gradifi.com, promises to give students a more statistically sound review by actually predicting the grade an individual student would receive in a course, reports the Yale Daily News.
Dan Loewenherz, a junior and the creator of the site, told the student paper he wants students to have resources beyond peer reviews when they pick their courses. Although Yale has an official Online Course Information Web site, Loewenherz said the catalog doesn’t offer a very detailed perspective.
“We have all this information, sure, but most of it we could get from friends,” Loewenherz told the Daily News. “The course comments range from saying ‘this is the best course’ to ‘don’t even take this course.’”
Gradifi will use a complex algorithm to predict the grades that students will earn in particular courses based on the grades they have earned in other courses. Loewenherz said the site will eventually include grade-distribution graphs and a comparison of workloads for different courses and instructors. As of this morning, Gradifi is under construction, but the home page says it will be back up “in about a day.”
Yale officials told the Daily News that students already have adequate information for selecting courses and cautioned against using unverified academic information as a basis for their decisions.
“Distribution of grading in a course is not a good basis of informing a choice of whether or not to enroll in that course,” Joseph W. Gordon, dean of undergraduate education, said in an e-mail message to the newspaper. —Caitlin Moran
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.