Earlier this month, a new website called SwatCoRe was unveiled to Swarthmore students. Peng Zhao ’15 and Yenny Cheung ’16 designed SwatCoRe (Swarthmore Course Review) to help facilitate the course selection process. The site allows students to search courses in a user-friendly way (such as searching for a writing course without having to look for the (W) in small print), while also reading anonymous reviews about the classes from previous students.
There are several resources available to students when they are in the process of choosing classes for the upcoming semester. Students can search through the course catalogue or use the tri-co course guide, but often the course title and blurb don’t give sufficient information about what a class is actually like. This difficulty of the process is debatably mitigated or exacerbated by the existence of search engines and rating sites made public to all students, such as ratemyprofessors.com.
“It’s honestly a bit ridiculous that, up until now, we’ve had to rely on RateMyProfessors, because that website is just atrocious,” says Z.L. Zhou ’16.
According to Zhao and Cheung, SwatCoRe was influenced by the University of Pennsylvania’s system of course evaluation and course listings. UPenn’s system is run by Penn Student Government and requires students to fill out evaluations in order to view their own grades. SwatCoRe’s founders hope it will serve as an improved, simpler system and help students navigate courses at Swarthmore.
“The vision of the website is to promote information transparency between students and faculty/the administration,” Zhao and Cheung said. “We firmly believe that we have the right to obtain all the information about a course before we make a decision on what classes to take. We look forward to working with the Swarthmore Student Council to improve transparency of academic resources.”
Currently the website is in its testing phase, and therefore has only been publicized within the computer science department, but it is accessible to anyone who has a Swarthmore username. Zhao and Cheung hope that SwatCoRe will continue to develop and soon be widely used by the entire community. As of now, there are 139 registered users, 205 different visitors, and 2231 pageviews. Almost all of the course listings from the last two years have been uploaded to the website.
Other computer science students are collaborating with Zhao and Cheung to add additional helpful functions to SwatCoRe. Jerry Qin ’17 came up with the idea of an open curriculum feature, in which the syllabus for each class listing would be available. This would similarly allow for greater transparency in the process of choosing courses.
The website is still in the process of revision, but the creators hope that it will become widely used in the near future. They also added that they are still looking for students to help with the site.
“I think that the website needs some work, but it’s definitely something that Swat’s currently lacking, so it’s great that someone’s stepped up to the plate and provided an option,” said Zhou. “I think that Yenny and Peng’s website is well-designed, modern, and rather intuitive to use, which is nice. It’s currently a bit bare on reviews, but that’s something that I hope will improve with time, especially when we start picking classes for next semester.”
The website is viewable at http://swatcoursereview.com.
