Netflix-Style Course Evaluation Systems Picking Up Steam at US Colleges
There’s a fascinating piece up today at The Chronicle‘s website on a new trend in student course evaluation — “smart” recommendation systems.
The premise is that course evaluations, on their own, don’t tell provide you with as much information as they could about how you’re likely to respond to (and how well you’re likely to do in) a particular class. If most of the folks taking “Immigration in America” are upper-level Sociology majors, and you’re a Bio student looking to fill out a distribution requirement, the fact that the prof gets high ratings for clarity doesn’t tell you a lot about whether you’re likely to sink or swim.
A smart course recommendation system, on the other hand, can pull out course evaluations from students like you — same year, same major, even similar GPAs — to see how folks in your position responded to a given class or professor. As the Chronicle notes, it’s basically applying the Netflix “our best guess for you” approach to
