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Evaluate Stanford Courses with CIDRAE Model

· 2 min read

I created a model "CIDRAE" to evaluate various courses from Stanford Graduate School of Business

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Confession of a Stanford Sloan Fellow Series EP24

I've been thinking about evaluating each course I've taken in Stanford Sloan Program individually, but I'm afraid that my often highly opinionated remarks would hurt some feelings and doom my future career in the Silicon Valley. So I developed a framework during today's less-than-eventful class, called CIDRAE, to express a more balanced and comprehensive critique for each course. My idea was inspired from the group exercise project (the U Penn PhD curriculum one) for a course in the Fall Quarter GSBGEN239 Executive Communication Strategies. 

  • Contents Usefulness

    How useful are the contents? How relevant are they to me? Are they what I want to learn?

  • Instructor's Presentation

    Is the instructor inspiring? Is his presentation creative, engaging, or conducive for learning?

  • Dynamics in Classroom

    Is there usually a spirited discussion or debate among students in the class? Are students proactively sharing their views and experiences to enhance the overall learning for the class?

  • Reading Load

    How heavy is the reading material? Are they compulsory or optional?

  • Assignment/Project Load

    How heavy is the work load from assignments and projects (individual and group)?

  • Exam Pressure

    How stressful is it to prepare for the exam? How menacing does the exam look like? How much psychological pressure does it impose on me?

C, I, D more or less measure how much I get out of the course, and R, A, E measure how much effort I need to put into the course. For every course, I'll measure it under these six dimensions and assign a value from 1 to 5. 5 is the highest extend, and 1 is the lowest extend. Also it's worth noting that RAE reflects how I treat the course requirement, rather than what is officially required by the syllabus. The entire CIDRAE score is, therefore, highly idiosyncratic.

Denote:

CID Index = Sum (C + I + D) / 3

RAE Index = Sum (R + A + E) / 3

CIDRAE Index = CID Index / RAE Index

... to be continued in Summer Qtr Course Evaluation