It’s a new year. It’s a new Street.

Highbrow is wading in your dirty, stinking rush stories. Did you make the cut?

If you had a chance between all the boot-licking and lobby-vomiting to do some last-minute course searching, you owe Ego of the Week and Penn Course Review Editor-in-Chief Michael Roberts a big “Thanks!” balloon for keeping it klassy.

Food & Drink is frankly a little concerned for your health. And that’s why they want you to eat breakfast. Feature’s got your mental well-being in mind. Why not take a trip to one of our curated spots in Philly?

Music is looking into the future. Film is singing John Goodman’s praises. Arts planned out your Saturday and it involves billboards and burritos. And of course, Lowbrow’s got teh zingers on teh rush.

And don’t forget our Writers’ Meeting tonight! 6:30. 4015 Walnut. Love you missed you can’t wait to see you!!!

Remember when we told you about how Penn Course Review had improved its internal structure by adding in a better search function and other fancy new doodads? Unfortunately, it seems that the new system is fraught with many alleged errors, like listing professors under wrong courses and giving other false information. That ain’t right! And yet, these concerns shed light on an even larger issue. The entire concept of PCR is kind of… Well, how much do you value the opinions of other undergraduates when forming your own academic decisions? Professor Max Cavitch of the English Department summed up these concerns quite nicely in an email sent out to English majors today:

A new and “improved” beta version of the Penn Course Review went on-line today.  DO NOT USE IT.  It is FULL of errors.  For example, dozens and dozens of courses in the English Department alone are listed under the wrong professor and/or course title.

It’s that time of year again: course selection season.

Whether you’re a freshman who needs a sure A to boost whatever’s left of your GPA after pledging, or a sophomore still looking for a course that inspires you (seriously?), or even a junior trying to fulfill that last Physical World requirement, look no further than kid-tested, mother-approved Penn Course Review.

With Advance Registration deadlines fast approaching (this Sunday!), PCR just uploaded qualitative reviews for hundreds of courses across the university. And for the first time ever, this includes Nursing! This means that more of the courses you’re curious about not only have number ratings, but have little blurbs describing the course and the professor based on comments provided by viewers like you! (PBS joke? Anyone else watch Arthur as a child? Or even last summer? I swear there was nothing else on TV…)

Looks like PennInTouch and Blackboard got jealous of AirPennNet’s Best Of Penn fame (Best Technological Failure) and are fighting back. Both are alternating between being down and really slow, presumably because it’s the last night to register for spring courses. And if that wasn’t bad enough, you apparently can’t Google Penn Course Review anymore– you have to get to it through Penn Portal. Or you can find it here. Thank us later.

The ending of a year is always bittersweet, as we think back on those who ascended to the Heavens this calendar cycle. Sure, Michael Jackson and DJ AM died, but so did some of our favorite and least favorite campus institutions. As the year comes to a close, we pay tribute to those we lost in ’09:

Transit
Deceased: April 2009
Cause of Death: All good things must come to an end?
Survived By: Painfully bad fake ID’s, Theos, short black skirts, the eight people in each bathroom stall, Lil’ Wayne anthems.
In Memoriam: We were crushed to hear the most epic of downtown venues was closing up. Transit was the rare friend to all: a trippy rave spot and Spring Fling bonanza locale bundled up into one massive, sweaty dance hall.

Jewish deli breakfasts, sub-par PennDining on Spruce, Scantron sheets and old school fro yo after the jump!

Ever since Advanced Registration opened we’ve been trying to pick courses, but there’s one thing that makes it really difficult. Nowhere on Penn Course Review does it indicate how well a professor can dance! And if you’re like us, you aren’t about to place your education in the hands of someone who might not even be able to navigate his way through a fox trot or the Viennese Waltz with relative ease.

Thanks to Penn Latin and Ballroom Dance (PLBD), you won’t have to! Sunday night in Bodek Lounge (Houston Hall) from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. they will be hosting an event called Dancing with the Professors. Here’s what the PLBD has to say about it:

We’ve paired up PLBD members with professors to learn ballroom dances all through the semester, such as Cha-Cha, Waltz, Swing, and Tango. On Sunday November 15th, they will showcase their talents in hopes of being crowned the Latin or Ballroom Champion — a choice that is left up to you, the audience! Upon watching the performances and hearing judges’ remarks, you will vote for your favorite couples. Cheer on your favorite teachers, or just come to see some spectacular dancing!!

We’re not sure why any professors have agreed to this, or whether or not we’re alone in feeling weird about students and faculty pairing up, but it should be a thoroughly entertaining evening.

Advanced Registration for Spring courses will begin in just a week (Nov. 9), which has us thinking about how much the schedule planning process sucks. Sure, the new Penn InTouch helped a little, but arranging classes still requires juggling between 45,230 browser windows (not to mention the tabs!) at once. Penn Course Review is among the more terrible parts of the process, but thanks to the nerds student web programmers behind a new site called Cobol on Rails, you’ll never have to use it again! Check out details after the jump.  Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody knows the best way to keep abreast of what’s new at Penn is to look down.  That way, you can kill two birds with one stone by avoiding eye contact with flyer-wielding classmates AND simultaneously checking out the chalkings.  Which is to say, we noticed, or more accurately, stepped on, the URL “PennCourseReviewED.com” enough times over the past few days that it piqued our curiosity.  So we checked it out.  A UTB appraisal:

• Straight off the bat, we were annoyed we had to register and make up a screenname.  Our lives are complicated enough.
• Aside from a rather spirited debate on the merits of Introduction to Cognitive Science (who knew?), the site is looking pretty empty.  It relies on user-submitted reviews, but no one’s going to start writing reviews until the site gets popular, and blah blah blah vicious circle.
• Which brings us to another point: we already have Penn Course Review, and we read last week that that shit is going online-only, making this site totally redundent as of next semester, which we don’t actually feel that bad about, since the site grew out of a class project and doesn’t seem to have any kind of agenda. (But they could have named it whatever they wanted to differentiate it from PCR, and all they came up with was adding -ED?  Really?)
• The site is also not very intuitively designed–the majority of courses don’t have reviews, but every class offered at Penn seems to be listed, and there’s no way to limit searches to only courses that have reviews.
• Bottom Line: An imperfect tool for selecting classes, but thanks for trying, guys!