Long story short: a group of students got together and built something pretty awesome, the Swarthmore Course Review, or SwatCoRe for short.

If you’re curious, check out some FAQs:

What is SwatCoRe?

SwatCoRe is a student-led initiative to try to make course information more easily accessible to students. Anyone can review a course, upload a syllabus (look for the icon), and vote for helpful reviews.

Isn’t this the same as RateMyProfessor?

Well, kind of. SwatCoRe is more course- than professor-focused, though, as professors may have certain strengths and weaknesses. Also SwatCoRe is locally focused, we hope to build a community of peer reviewers that is more focused on Swarthmore. Have you tried looking for a Swat professor on RMP? Good luck.

Who can see my reviews?

Anyone with a TriCo (@swarthmore, @haverford, or @brynmawr) email address can sign up for SwatCoRe. As our intention is to benefit the Swarthmore community, we have no intention of publicizing these reviews.

I took a pretty strong stance on requiring users to verify their identities via a school-hosted email address because I didn’t want SwatCoRe to turn into a negative community (à la Yik Yak). SwatCoRe users can pick whatever community-facing name they want (only logged-in users, community members, can view reviews), but ultimately site admins will know who is responsible for any content.

Fortunately, we haven’t had any issues with content at all so far. At the time of writing, there have been 230 reviews posted and not a single one of them has been rated overall unhelpful (208 helpful reviews!). We publish live statistics so that it’s easy to see just how many people are being helped by your review (~350 users within a month after soft launch).

The code being deployed is viewable on GitHub. We use Heroku to auto-deploy from a production branch, so what you see is what you get (and it’s super-easy to modify and extend, if you want to fork it).

I have so much to say about SwatCoRe, a labor of love long pursued, but I hope to take my hands off and watch a community grow. We believe that SwatCoRe will grow to become a real resource for the Swarthmore student body.