Critical Review (Brown University)
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| Categories | Brown University |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Semiannual |
| First issue | 1976 |
| Company | student organization |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Website | www |
The Critical Review is a student publication that produces reviews of course offerings at Brown University. The student group that produces it is also called the Critical Review. The reviews are written by Brown students from course evaluation questionnaires distributed to class members in the final days of the academic semester. Its purpose is to help students make informed course choices and to help instructors improve pedagogical techniques by supplementing the information in The Brown Course Announcement with real student experiences.
In 1976, just seven years after Brown's "New Curriculum" had been announced, The Other View: A Consumer's Guide to Courses at Brown was started by a group of Brown undergraduates as a publication of the Undergraduate Council of Students. In this annual magazine, students wrote reviews of courses based on responses to both the organization's own questionnaires and also based on departmental questionnaires which were made available by several departments. The written evaluations were short, and the numerical ratings sections, when presented, consisted of only averages. Department Undergraduate Groups were essential to the process because they distributed and collected questionnaires from classes and helped to develop customized questionnaires for their respective departments.
There was no set process for putting the magazine together, and since the questionnaires were different for different classes, the course summaries varied significantly in terms of what information they presented and emphasized. "There must be a better way than having three people slave over questionnaires in the UCS office for two summer months," wrote the editors on the cover page of one of the first editions, "A more rational, uniform process must be developed." Sometime between 1978 and 1981, the name was changed to The Critical Review: A Consumer's Guide to Courses at Brown, and then to simply The Critical Review a few years later. The number of courses reviewed in each edition varied considerably from year to year. The editors changed the procedure for compiling the magazine annually. Co-Editors-in-Chief Tom Mashberg '82 and Ian Maxtone-Graham '82.5 led one such overhaul.
In 1984, recently appointed Editor-in-Chief Rob Markey sought feedback from students and faculty and then overhauled the system in time to create a 1985–1986 Semester I edition, the first issue of the Critical Review to cover a single semester. The editors introduced the now standard two-reviews-per-page format, with bar graphs, which were meant to depict the general distribution of student responses. The bar graphs were implemented in order to improve the accountability of the Critical Review by balancing the written summaries with objective data from the student surveys and by presenting sample sizes, so that professors would know the reviews were not based on the comments of just one or two students. The editors also created customized software to make it easy to produce the bar graphs. They developed a matching questionnaire to generate the student input on the courses in quantitative form. However, at this point the Critical Review still relied on professors to distribute its questionnaires, which some refused to do or did haphazardly. The publication also accepted departmental evaluation forms as an alternative to its own questionnaire. As a result, bar graphs were not available for many classes. Nevertheless, having found a satisfactory and manageable system to which Brown students and faculty responded favorably, subsequent editors changed relatively little about the format, process, and policy of the Critical Review over the next few years.
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