Here at Barnard and Columbia around the beginning of the November, the website culpa.info has a lot of traffic. The website, whose name stands for Columbia Underground Listing of Professor Ability, is valuable to many students while picking their next semester of cources. However, how valuable is it really?
The simple format of the website is that students can search for either courses or professors to get an overview of what the classes they are interested in are like. Here is an example of the review for a course I am in now, entitled Music, Race and Identity.
Recommended for you
In many ways, the idea of CULPA is very helpful. As course descriptions can often be cryptic, CULPA can give students the real idea of what a class is like. Also, syllabi are not available before a class starts, so it can be really helpful to see how certain classes lay our their assignments.
However, in many other ways, I think that CULPA goes against the spirit of academics. While CULPA has hopefully saved many students from the wrath of an awful professor, ultimately we don’t go to college for specific professors. Hopefully we should be able to trust that Barnard and Columbia puts enough effort into hiring their faculty that any professor will give students an education worthy of what they are paying for.
The other problem with CULPA is that every student has a different experience in the class. Someone who wrathfully writes a negative CULPA review for a class they did not do well in because the lecture was boring or slow possibly felt it was boring because that was not the right subject for them; but it could be the perfect subject for you. The fact that many professors have extremely different kinds of CULPA reviews proves this fact even more. While it might seem like a good idea to take or not take a class because of an anonymous student’s online suggestion, ultimately the only judge of whether a class is good is you, and the only way to find out is to take it and learn from that experience.
