When students opened up their campus mailboxes a few days ago, they found a copy of this year's Course Evaluation Guide, a handbook released every year that details student feedback on courses offered at Brandeis. First-years, take note: This tool is designed to give you an essential heads-up on the difficulty, workload and overall quality of courses and the effectiveness of professors. This year's guidebook was improved by the addition of an index in the back with all the professors names, and humorous student quotes about classes and professors in the introduction.
The guide as a whole, however, was a letdown and failed to live up to the handbook's potential as a valuable academic resource. The guidebook, which may be a first-years most reliable source of learning about academics at Brandeis, is virtually unreadable and disorganized. This is on top of the fact that it was $1,000 over budget, as reported at last night's Union Senate meeting.While past years' guides have suffered for errors and typos to which this year's book is no exception, that the 2002 book is virtually innavigable makes it worse than usual. Categories -- including responsiveness, contribution, effort, workload and skill -- were unclear; a new student may not know what the numbers meant, although a returning student would know that "5" is the best rating and "1" the worst.

In addition, this year's book failed to clearly differentiate between departments, and placed courses within those departments iillogically; a student searching for a given course by the number would be encumbered by the jumbled course order. "Legal Studies" flowed without notice to "Latin," "journalism" and "Japanese" courses.

Students who can learn to navigate the book have an essential resource at their fingertips, but if there are so many obstacles to figuring out what the data means and how to find it, incoming students are unlikely to take advantage of the important student feedback recorded in its pages.