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Reading a Critical Review

The Written Review

The prose review consists of four paragraphs that describe the experience of the course as related by the students who responded to the questions on the back of the Critical Review questionnaires. Instructors' comments are also incorporated into the written reviews where applicable and when appropriate.

The first paragraph provides a sense of the curricular content of the course and the required background. It also explains how the course contributed to respondents' overall educational experiences at Brown. The second paragraph summarizes students' comments about the teaching methods of the instructor and about their opportunities to get as much as possible out of the course. The third paragraph notes the reading and assignments in the course, with feedback about how helpful these materials were and about how they could be improved. The fourth paragraph provides information about the course workload and general suggestions from the class to fellow students thinking about enrolling in the course and to instructors interested in possible ways of improving it.

All writers' reviews undergo three rounds of editing, during which they are checked for accuracy and objectivity: we do not tolerate bias in the writing process. Please use this portion of the review as much, if not more than, the bar graph: overall it is more indicative of the character and structure of a course than the bar graph and averages, which can only provide information from the student responses about particular questions, some of which are hardly applicable to certain courses.

Averages

The instructor average is the average response given to questions in the instructor section of the questionnaire. The course average is the average response given to the questions in the Structure and Content sections, apart from "Class was difficult" and "Good for non-concentrators."

The averages should not be interpreted as an absolute method of judging courses. They will not reflect the experience of every student in a particular course or with a particular professor. The degree of variation in the responses provided by students, as evident from the bar graph itself, is much more important than the averages in determining the degree of student satisfaction with a particular course.

Remember that lower numerical ratings signify stronger agreement with the statements on the questionnaire. In other words, a rating of "1" is better than a rating of "4."

The Bar Graph

Example of a bar graph

Numerical ratings of the course are explicitly presented through the bar graph chart found under the "Graph" tab. Each questionnaire statement is summarized on the left, and the bar on the right indicates the percentage of the class that gave each response. For example, look at the statement "Grading policy was clear and fair." The dark green portion of the bar indicates that 15% of the students responded "1" or "strongly agree" with this statement; the light blue portion indicates that about 45% responded "2;" etc. The red represents students who gave a response of "4" or "strongly disagree."

The blank space to the right of a bar represents students who gave a "Not Applicable" response, meaning that the particular statement did not apply for the course. In this example, the bar for the statement "Assigned readings worthwhile" only covers about 90% of the range. This indicates that 10% of students either did not reply or did not think that the statement applied to this particular course.

Demographics

Course demographics are presented in the form of pie charts under the "Demographics" tab. We report the following information:

  • Class: the years (freshman, sophomore, etc.) of class members. This data is obtained from the Registrar and represents the complete enrollment of the class
  • Concentrator: whether respondents are concentrators in the department, non-concentrators, or undecided. This data is gathered from questionnaire responses.
  • Taking this course for a grade: whether respondents are taking the course for a grade (A, B, C) or S/NC. This data is gathered from questionnaire responses.
  • Taking this course to satisfy a requirement: This data is gathered from questionnaire responses.