Undergraduate Schools

How do Wharton, the College, Engineering and Nursing stack up? Students in each undergraduate school exchange some friendly fire over the difficulty and breadth of their course load. Students in Engineering and Nursing report that their classes require more work and are more difficult than Wharton and College classes. But College and Nursing students report high course quality and instructor quality scores - students taking Wharton and Engineering classes report that they have lower quality and poorer instructors, on average.

Course Difficulty

Yes, it's true - humanities classes heavily populate the list of Penn's easiest courses, and STEM classes (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) monopolize the list of hardest courses, based on course difficulty ratings. Half-credit music ensembles and film seminars are among the easiest classes Penn has to offer. Meanwhile, 23 of the top 30 most difficult classes Penn offers fall under the STEM umbrella. Design and architecture classes also frequent the list of Penn's difficult course offerings.

Quiz: How hard are my classes?
Sharing Samba
30 easiest and hardest classes at Penn
Top 30 hardest humanities classes at Penn

Sectors

Though many classes qualify to meet the seven general education requirements known as "sectors," many more of them don't. The "Natural Sciences & Mathematics" and "Physical World" sectors - which have relatively few courses that fulfill them - are consistently ranked the lowest of the sectors based on course quality. They are also ranked well below the average non-sector course. These results corroborates other data showing that students rate STEM courses more poorly than other courses across all variables. The "Arts & Letters" and "Humanities" sectors are ranked the highest of the sectors, with ratings that match the average non-sector course.

Writing Seminar

Penn Course Review data supports the student anecdotes suggesting they don't like their writing seminars - the only course that all undergraduates must take. Though writing seminar faculty have consistently tried to improve the curriculum over the years, the evaluation data shows steady results each year: Writing seminars have an average course quality significantly lower than that of other Penn classes. Students also report that writing seminars require more work than other courses, but they rate the course difficulty and quality of their instructors similar to the average Penn class. Data is not yet available to examine whether the overhaul of the writing seminar curriculum that began last summer will change the sentiment on student evaluations.

Previous Next Shun Sakai | Online Graphics Associate

Class Size

Previous Next

Some introductory classes contain over 100 students, but small seminars can have as few as two. Penn's smallest classes have higher course quality ratings than medium-sized classes, which in turn are rated higher than large classes. The cognitive science department has the most students enrolled per class, followed by biology and then chemistry. The language classes Turkish, Sanskrit and Urdu have the smallest class sizes of any departments.

The Rate Depression

Everything faculty had come to expect in their Penn Course Review evaluations went out the window in Spring 2009, when the average scores on nearly every variable dropped significantly. This was the semester that the university switched from pencil and paper to online course evaluations, which somehow led to much lower average ratings of courses, professors and departments. Work required and course difficulty are the only variables that appeared to stay flat. In order to avoid skewing the results, we have restricted all of our other analyses to ratings from Spring 2009 onward.

Credits

"Your courses, deconstructed" is the culmination of over a year of data analysis and research, which led to a long spring semester of reporting, writing and editing, along with the production of an unprecedented number of graphics - both static and interactive.

Editors and staff members belonging to nearly every Daily Pennsylvanian department were involved in the cultivation of this project. Our news editors wrote in-depth stories exploring every facet of the Penn Course Review data. Copy editors worked hectically to keep up with all the text accompanying the project. Staffers in the online graphics department each took on an assignment, ready and eager to contribute.

Of course, this could not have been done without Harry Cooperman, who has been enthusiastic about open data since I met him way back when we were fellow crime beat reporters. Harry took on the brunt of the work of analyzing the absurd amount of data we were able to gain access to. He was always on call to answer any questions, and he even found time to write a couple of articles for the project.

I owe special thanks to Penn's Executive Director for Education and Academic Planning Rob Nelson for putting up with our team's endless questions and requests. He showed excitement for our project from the beginning, regardless how it turned out.

Also, I have to thank Lauren Feiner for letting me run around this semester acting like I'm still important.