• core
• Art Hum
• FoS
• Gateway
• Music Hum
• UW
• CC
• Lit Hum
• af-am studies
• am studies
• anthropology
• app physics + math
• archaeology
• architecture
• art history
• as-am studies
• astronomy
• bio + biomed eng
• business
• ethnic studies
• chem + chem eng
• civil eng
• classics
• comp sci
• dance
• eee
• ees
• ealac
• eeeb
• economics
• education
• electrical eng
• english + comp lit
• film
• fys
• french
• germanic lang + lit
• history
• human rights
• ieor
• italian
• latino studies
• law
• math
• mech eng
• medicine
• mealac
• music
• philosophy
• physed
• physics
• poli sci
• psych
• religion
• SIPA
• journalism
• slavic languages
• sociology
• spanish + portu
• speech
• statistics
• swedish
• theater
• underwater bw
• urban studies
• visual arts
• women's studies
• writing

Welcome to the new CULPA!

So... hey. What's up? CULPA's been cleaning house a bit lately. As you can see, we've got a new front end (for you non-technologically inclined folks, that's, roughly speaking, the portion of the website you can see). But thanks to the expertise of our dedicated in-house programmer, the whole website's actually running on a completely different platform now. We kept the reviews from the old website, of course--or most of them, anyway (getting to that shortly)--but now the way you interact with them should be a bit smoother, because instead of a lot of clunky old programming from sometime in the late 1990s, the site's running on Ruby on Rails. Don't know what that is? That's okay. Just trust us: it's good... it's efficient... and it lets us develop new features for CULPA pretty much as fast as we can come up with them.

As far as what you really care about, the data on the website, which is to say your wonderful database of reviews: it's still here for you, but it's better than ever. We're in the middle of a long process of pruning-- to give you an idea of the sort of task this is, think of two gardeners with one set of clippers each paring back the wild branches of a rosebush the size of Texas. There are a lot of reviews we've got here, and, as you may have noticed, some of them are of professors who are no longer here. In other cases, several reviews of the same class are listed, but each one has a different class name. That's partially a result of the way the site was (poorly) designed to work in the past, and partially due to the way it used to be maintained. Long story short, we're working to fix that now, and to align reviews of professors and courses with the professors and courses (as well as course numbers!!) for every single review on the website.

Every review on the website? That's over 16,000 reviews. So we're not done yet. But we're working on it. Indeed, you'll notice some departments are cleaner than others, as we're cleaning up roughly in order of popularity. So pardon us while we keep on with the housecleaning. And please, do not hesitate to send us a note about anything and everything you see on the site which does not seem to match up with the way things actually are: by this we mean misnamed classes, professors who've retired, misnamed professors, professors listed as teaching assistants (or vice-versa), misnumbered courses.... whatever you can find, we appreciate your help. So drop us a line by e-mail or, if you've got a comment about one item in particular, use the link at the top of the navigation bar at the left to "Send CULPA a comment about" whatever you're looking at.

And of course, keep those reviews coming! We don't just mean the ones you loved and the ones you hated, either: we want to hear about them all - and so do your peers. So, since you're not going to write that paper or study for that final tonight, sit down and write a few review instead! Take a look at our style guide, and then go at it. We'll be happy to hear from you.

Thanks,

The CULPA Team

December 9, 2008