Yale Computer Society’s CourseTable purports to make the process of choosing courses easier for undergrads — and indeed it has condensed a lot of potentially overwhelming information into one handy chart and is certainly easier to use than Yale’s Course Search platform — but it both reflects and facilitates a problematic relationship between students and their choices about their education.

 Students tend to use it by scanning courses for high numbers next to teachers’ names and low numbers in the column for workload. They end up “shopping” for classes online in this way, making decisions based on user ratings, much the way they would for products on Amazon. Just like online shopping has largely replaced American retail, Yale has allowed CourseTable to replace the once-beloved “shopping period,” still a consumer model but at least one where students could explore a variety of classes in the opening weeks of the semester. 

Many students prioritize finding classes where they’ll have to do the least work, which is not exactly the best measure for shaping your education. Often when you work the hardest, you learn the most. And you sometimes don’t recognize a class as a good one until time has passed and you realize how much you learned or how it’s changed the way you think or how widely you can apply what you gained from it. Doing less work in a class often minimizes this effect.

But CourseTable is not the problem — it is a symptom of a modern college environment where opportunity cost is king. Of course, it is in the best interest of a student aiming for a law school or medical school application to take the classes most likely to grant them an A, i.e. gut classes. And let’s face it: most Yale students got here by filling their calendars with extracurriculars and achievements in high school, and this continues for many at Yale. Academics might only be part of a pre-professional means to an end, and the “workload” number on CourseTable feeds into this approach.  

The other main number students focus on, the one next to a teacher’s name, is misleading in a different way. This number is not derived from a rating of the teacher’s performance or effectiveness, as many students believe; it is the average of student responses on course evaluations to the question, “What is your overall assessment of this course?” 

But students tend to like certain courses better than others, regardless of who’s teaching them. In the Political Science, Economics and Philosophy departments, just to name a few, there are professors whose ratings are skewed lower because they teach big lecture courses. The lectures almost always receive lower ratings than seminars, no matter who is teaching them, meaning that the professor’s overall rating takes a hit. 

Yes, there is another number indicating a teacher’s rating only for a specific course, but it still has the problem of being derived from this “overall course” question. If CourseTable must be so reductive, why not use one of the other more teaching-centric metrics on student evaluations, such as, “This course was well organized to facilitate student learning” or “I received clear feedback that improved my learning”? One or both of those numbers combined would be a more accurate reflection of the teaching. 

 There is also no indication on CourseTable, unless you dig a little deeper — which many students don’t — of the number and variety of courses represented by these averages. A new teacher might teach one course for one semester and get a high rating on it, which now appears as their definitive value, while another teacher has taught full-time at Yale for 20 years, teaching a range of types of courses — the fun and the less fun — including through the dismal pandemic years, and thus have a lower overall rating. It creates a false equivalency.

You could argue that using student evaluations as a barometer for choosing classes at all is not ideal. Students are not always the best judges of the quality of their own education. Of course, the amount that students learned in a class definitely influences the rating in a positive direction, but we should be honest about what course ratings often truly reflect: some combination of a teacher’s charisma and the ease of the class. 

Before CourseTable gained traction over the last several years, there were a number of factors that students would consider in choosing courses, probably the main one being word-of-mouth. When the process of choosing a class became purely algorithmic, much of the nuance was lost. The recommendations from friends, FroCos, academic advisors and other professors all suddenly had less weight than these few numbers on a chart. This means that now students are missing out on classes they might otherwise have gotten a lot out of.

And CourseTable has real effects on teachers and departments: if a class has low enrollment one year, it may get pulled from the roster the following year. This not only changes the shape of the curriculum but potentially the terms of teaching contracts, especially if someone is not protected by tenure.

 So, as you register for courses this week, remember that the numbers on CourseTable don’t tell the whole story. You don’t have to take a grand moral stand against an educational landscape that has already shifted, but you might get more out of your time at Yale if you just look beyond CourseTable’s bright and shiny colors.

We think that a good education is more than a product to be consumed — even if it has a somewhat consumeristic underlying structure. It is a delicate balance of students’ needs and teachers’ expertise and abilities, and the growth — of both students and teachers — happens in the spaces where those two things meet. If Yale students are, in fact, just trying to maximize fun and minimize effort, then CourseTable is a useful tool, but if that’s the only reason they’re at Yale, then we have a bigger problem.

CARTER DEWEES is a senior in Saybrook College. He can be reached at carter.dewees@yale.edu.

PAM NEWTON is a Lecturer in the English department and the Residential College Writing Tutor in Pauli Murray College. She can be reached at pamela.newton@yale.edu.