CULPA 3.0

October 10, 2009

Welcome to CULPA 3.0!. You're now looking at the next generation of Columbia's professor review website. It's shinier, friendlier and easier to navigate, but we've also made some major changes under the hood:

Syllabi

We know that the nuts-and-bolts of course offerings—reading lists, exam schedules and the like—are often as important as professor quality when choosing a class. That's why we've added syllabi to professor and course pages. Now you can share not just your own thoughts, but real course outlines. Whether it's epistemology or neurobiology, you'll know what you're getting yourself into.

Quotes

Your professors (to paraphrase Bill Cosby) say the darndest things. Now, when you really need a little gem of wisdom from the delightful Molly Murray or the dapper Xavier Sala-i-Martin, we've got you covered. The Bwog has graciously allowed us to start our collection their own assortment of professor quotes, and from now on we'll be gathering up every line of sheer genius or absolute lunacy that you hear in class. After all, there's no better way to understand a professor than with his own words.

Directory Courses

We've been hard at work this semester continuing our process of integrating information from Columbia's Directory of Courses with our database of almost 18,000 reviews. We've already made Columbia's directory data a central part of our quote and syllabus features, and as the year goes on, expect to see real scheduling information from Columbia in more places.

With all these changes, there might be a thing or two we've missed. Found a bug? Dying for a feature that didn't make it into 3.0? Just let us know, and we'll see what we can do.

—The CULPA team

Support CULPA

April 22, 2009

CULPA is run by students for students. We don't get any funding from Columbia by any means, so all of our expenses are out-of-pocket. If you feel like CULPA has helped you out in any way over the years, feel free to drop us a buck or two to offset our hosting costs. If we can raise ~$20/mo to pay our hosting fees, we can get rid of ads entirely!

Donate via PayPal

Post-Midterms Features

March 28, 2009

Dear Columbians,

Just as you start getting used to a new semester, it begins to wind down. Final projects are assigned, exams approach, and you realize that you've retained merely a factoid or two from the thousands (at least, hopefully more than dozens) of pages you've read this semester. We feel your pain. In an effort to reduce your blood pressure, we've rolled out a small new feature. If you navigate to a department page on our website, you'll see that some professors have "New Reviews!" icons next to their names. We've done this to clue you in to who has been written about since the last semester began.

If you have any other features you'd like, simply let us know by posting a comment using the link at left!

As usual, we wish you a good rest of the semester.

The CULPA Team

Welcome Back!

January 13, 2009

A new semester is upon us! Welcome back to school.

For those of you who've already reviewed your professors from last semester: thank you! Your classmates appreciate your effort. (If you wrote a review before January 1st, it has been processed and should be visible.) To all of you, whether you've written some reviews or not: please do something for us all:

In the text box above and to the right, enter the name of a professor you had last semester and click "Search". If his or her name does not come up, that means that no reviews of the professor have been submitted yet. Please write a review! If the professor does have some reviews, but they are few, uninformative, or more than six months old, please write a review! Don't be afraid to reiterate what's already been said, either since people can change over time, students reading reviews will be more certain that what they read is relevant. Also, feeling ambivalent about whether you liked a class you had with a certain professor can be just as useful as really being sure that you liked or disliked it: telling your classmates what was good, what was bad, and what mediocre will really help them out. So, to reiterate: please write reviews!

By the by, you'll notice that we've reimplemented voting to agree or disagree with reviews. We're already at work on some other new features, too, but if you've got any ideas as to how we might improve the functionality of the site, please let us know by using the 'Contact' link.

As always, we hope that what we've got here is useful for you. Best of luck in this coming semester.

Thanks,

The CULPA Team