{FAQ}
Formerly Answered Queries
What is Penn Course ReviewED?
Penn Course ReviewED is a website made by students for students. Here you can give and receive feedback on courses offered at the University of Pennsylvania using numerical ratings and free written comments. This website is not officially affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. For more, see our about section.
Privacy and Anonymity
Will my comments remain anonymous?
You can remain anonymous through the use of an obscure screename. This is to prevent others from knowing who you are, allowing you to speak your mind.
Will my email remain private?
Your email is always kept private from other users. You will receive one email for verification purposes. You will also receive an email when somebody comments on a section you request. If necessary, your email is accessible to an administrator.
My Information
What information do I need to provide? The only thing we require is a valid upenn.edu email address. Also, we only allow one account per unique pennkey; this means that if you have a @sas and a @seas account, you may only register one of these.
Why do you need a valid .upenn.edu email? The information in the site is relevant only to UPenn students, or those registered in a UPenn course. Since the site may contain sensitive comments, we decided to restrict access to the general public, and open it only to a closed community of pertinent members.
Do I have to list my year, schools, majors, minors, or interests?
This is entirely optional. Providing this information may help others decide how useful your comment is to them. For example, if you are a Math major you might write a favorable comment for a Math class, while an English major might write an unfavorable comment for the same class. (This is not to say that English majors don't like Math.)
Guest Accounts
What if I don't have a valid .upenn.edu email?
You may send us an email and request a guest account. If we deem your reasons worthy, you will receive an email with instructions, and obtain a temporary account to have full access to the site.
What if my guest account expired?
A guest account expires 30 days after you register it. If you wish to receive an extension, contact us.
What may I say (or not say)?
You can criticize, praise, rant, give advice, make suggestions, or just tell us about your feelings.
However, we do ask that you please keep comments relevant to the course and/or professor. We also reserve the right to take action if you are posting highly inflammatory, derogatory, or very offensive comments, or we suspect you are purposefully misusing the site. If you see a user who may be breaking the rules, please tell us.
What are Requests?
If there is a course you would like to see more comments on, you can place a request on the Home page. The most recent and unanswered requests appear on every user's Home page when they log in. When somebody comments on the section you requested, you will be a sent a notification email and your request will be marked as answered.
Do you have all the courses I have ever taken?
We pull our data directly from Penn's websites. Any course or professor displayed in Penn's Registrar or last semester's Course Timetable should be in our database. Since this website was launched recently, we currently only have courses offered in Spring 2008, Summer 2008, Fall 2008, and Spring 2009 semesters.
If you see any discrepancies, feel free to let us know.
Who made Penn Course ReviewED?
Penn Course ReviewED started out at the University of Pennsylvania as a CIS 399 class project by students who found out (the long and hard way) that the best way to choose a course or professor was by asking about it. The original group of four people developed the concept by mapping out the underlying information architecture as well as making decisions on important features and functionality.
In an effort to provide fellow peers with a useful tool for that pre-registration craze, two eager students took this basic framework and rebuilt, redesigned and refined the project. Despite the many unforeseen obstacles that would have made many others give up, Penn Course ReviewED was fully implemented to completion.
We would like to thank all the people who made this project possible, from the inception of the concept to user testing to user enjoyment.
Hopefully this will help you have a better semester. If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to contact us.