Samad Hakani, Photography Editor

Draft your instructor permissions, refresh your browsers — course registration for spring 2025 is now open for all Yale College students.

With registration underway, one website is set to dominate students’ screens more than usual. Since 2012, CourseTable — a student-run platform that aggregates course ratings from the official Yale Course Search — has been the go-to resource for Yalies to explore courses and plan their semester schedules.

The News analyzed 10 years of publicly available data on over 21,880 courses taught since 2014.  From departments with the highest course ratings to classes with the lightest workloads, here’s what the News discovered to help you craft the perfect spring schedule.

After each semester, students can provide feedback on the courses they took. The highest score a class can receive is 5.0, and the lowest is 1.0.

Courses are generally well-rated. An average class score is 4.06, and over 60 percent of courses receive an overall score of 4.0 or higher. Only 24 classes since 2012 received a score below 2.0.

If a positive course experience is a priority for your next semester, you should choose seminars over lectures, at least according to student ratings. Seminars with less than 20 students enrolled had a median of 4.16. Large lectures, on the other hand, had a median of 3.52.

Among seminars, those sponsored by residential colleges have the highest average rating, with a whopping median of 4.43.

Over the past decade, the share of each discipline in course offerings has experienced notable changes.

The share of world language course offerings has declined since 2014, while the share of offerings in the social sciences and non-engineering sciences notably increased over the same period.

Meanwhile, the humanities have consistently dominated course offerings, accounting for 35 to 40 percent of courses.

Average ratings in the engineering and non-engineering sciences saw gains of 0.10 and 0.13 percentage points, respectively, since 2014. Nevertheless, the humanities and arts continue to dominate ratings, hovering 0.43 points above the engineering sciences.

Over the past three years, foreign language courses have taken up nine out of the ten highest-rated departments, with the exception of comparative literature, which ranked ninth.

The Mathematics Department has had the lowest-rated courses in the same time period. All engineering courses fell short of the Yale College average of 4.01, with Biomedical Engineering ranking highest among them with an average rating of 3.92.

As a course’s average workload increased, its average rating showed a downward-sloping trendline. A notable exception was found among foreign language courses, some of which got consistently higher-than-average average ratings despite high workloads.

Here is a list of the 40 new spring courses with no prerequisites nor a final exam ranked by professor ranking. While seminars make up the majority of these offerings, several lectures like “Astrology in India” and “Beyonce Makes History” are also being offered.

The future of CourseTable

Yale initially blocked CourseTable’s IP address from students in 2014. After significant student protest and national attention, however, the University renewed access to the site. 

Since 2019, CourseTable has been maintained by a group of student volunteers from the Yale Computer Society. The team is currently headed by Sida Chen ’26 and Alex Schapiro ’26. 

According to Schapiro, CourseTable receives over 7 million server requests a month, making it one of the most widely used student-created software at Yale. Schapiro told the news that the combination of interface and functionality draws students to use CourseTable over Yale Course Search.

“[CourseTable’s] interface is a lot more user friendly than the one offered by YCS in terms of being able to see ratings and reviews easily … [while] on YCS there is no link to course reviews … and there is no aggregation of data,” Schapiro told the News.

The team at CourseTable is continually gathering user feedback to increase its functionality. This semester, the team added the ability to get links to prerequisite courses, an updated social functionality and a new dropdown menu for lecture sections, among a dozen additional features planned.

Schapiro said he looks forward to an update that will introduce a feature allowing users to see when a course was last modified.

Registration period for spring 2025 will close for all students on Dec. 19 at 5:00 p.m.

Adam Walker contributed reporting.