If the weeklong break wasn’t enough to ease the pain of the last exam period, it might be worth taking another look at your course schedule for the coming semester. Shopping period starts tomorrow, which means it’s time to make good on that resolution to pick classes that will be just as interesting in May as they sound right now.

Easier said than done, but with the help of the registrar’s course evaluation results, you just might unearth a few of the intellectually fulfilling courses you imagined finding here – or at least avoid the universally despised.

graph by Nathan Serota '14

Humanities students had the highest overall satisfaction with the quality of their courses, rating them 4.1/5, while engineering and natural sciences students tied for the lowest course satisfaction at 3.7.

Among the departments, humanistic studies and East Asian studies grabbed top ratings at 4.5 and 4.4, respectively.  Neuroscience and linguistics students were the least happy with their classes, at 3.1 and 3.2, which goes to show that the outlook for the engineers and natural science students, whose departments rank solidly in the middle of the pack, isn’t so bleak after all.

If you do find your department trailing behind the happy-go-lucky humanities division, you can still avoid the lowest-rated classes.  ORF 245: Fundamentals of Engineering Statistics, and ORF 311: Optimization under Uncertainty tied for the dubious honor of least satisfying course, at 2.3.  WWS 300: Democracy was close behind at 2.4, followed by LIN 201: Introduction to Language & Linguistics with 2.5.

At the other end of the spectrum, there were several classes scoring a perfect 5 (including quite a few Woody Woo seminars, perhaps to make up for the required Democracy class).

Happy shopping! (?)