The grade distribution tool, a free service provided by A.S. Council, will use data sets from all UCSD classes since 2007. Students will be able to search by class, department or professor. “They [will be able to] see a summary of GPA — what the grade point average that the professor gives out on average, how much students tend to drop the class, and things along those lines,” Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs Mac Zilber said. “They [will] also be able to see… which classes at UCSD give out the most As, which ones give out the least.”
UCSD’s original grade distribution tool was taken down several years ago. The tool was not widely known to students and did not receive much traffic, Zilber said. The A.S. Academic Affairs Office had been working on creating a new grade distribution tool for about three years.
“Up until pretty recently, UCSD had a tool like this on its website,” Zilber said. “Once UCSD took the tool off the website, we felt that it would be useful for students to have access to this information in a way that was provided by a ucsd.edu address, not by some private company or something along those lines.”
Although similar third-party websites that evaluate teachers and classes, such as ratemyprofessors.com already exist, Zilber said that the council’s new tool will be less subjective. “I think this provides them with information that is more objective than things like Rate My Professors,” Zilber said. “I think that I often hear faculty complain that Rate My Professors is biased because only the students who love the class or the students that hate the class will report on what’s happening. So I think it’s nice to give students access to more objective information, and they don’t have to rely on a small sample size.” Zilber said he hopes that offering the grade distribution tool on the A.S. Council website will draw more traffic to the website and help A.S. Council promote a variety of other services in the future.