The Varsity has obtained over 3,000 rows of course evaluation data to determine how tens of thousands of students rate U of T’s academic units.
We obtained every available course evaluation from undergraduate Faculty of Arts & Science courses with publicly available results in the 2023–2024 fall and winter semesters. This does not include courses that professors opt out of sharing and those with fewer than five responses.
Finding an “Overall Score”
First, we averaged out the results of eight questions to find an “Overall Score” of how students feel about the 69 of the faculty’s academic units that offer courses. Academic units include departments, centres, institutes, schools, colleges, and free-standing, joint, and collaborative programs. The questions included the quality of assignments and how much enthusiasm instructors generated.
We then compared the “Overall Score” to obtain a ranking of the academic units.
Academic units vary in the number of courses offered, student enrolments per class, and course evaluation response rates. Instructors also use different methods of encouraging students to fill out the evaluations which can also affect the data and, therefore, the ranking of academic units’ “Overall Score.”
Statistics ranked worst
Out of all the 69 units, the Department of Statistical Sciences was ranked the lowest followed by Mathematics, Pharmacology & Toxicology, Biochemistry, and the Centre for Entrepreneurship.
Spencer Li — a third-year statistics and mathematics double major at UTSG — said, “My courses were either really good [or] really bad,” in an interview with The Varsity. “The way the course[s] [are] organized is pretty complicated. The test difficulty is… shockingly complicated,” including one course which he said he “really, really cried over.”
However, he maintains that he still would’ve chosen his two programs because of their employment prospects and wanted to “thank the [statistics] department for their hard work on the courses.”
Small humanities academic units ranked highest
The top-rated academic unit was the African Studies Centre followed by European and Eurasian Studies, Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies, Centre for Ethics, and the Centre for South Asian Studies.
“I really put a lot of effort into making the topic exciting,” said Antonela Arhin — associate director and a sessional lecturer at the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies — referring to an Advanced Topics in Diaspora & Transnational Studies course. In an interview with The Varsity, she said her course incorporates case studies, guest lectures, legal texts, and documentaries. Arhin notes that her courses go “above and beyond… merely lecturing.”
Ava Derro and Burak Batu Tunçel — both second-year students specializing in cinema studies at UTSG and organizers at the Cinema Studies Student Union — found that people taking courses in the Cinema Studies Institute were already interested in the subject matter. The Cinema Studies Institute ranked 19th out of the 69 academic units offered by the faculty.
“Whether it’s a major, minor, or specialist, they’re there because they love cinema,” said Tunçel in an interview with The Varsity.
Hardest and easiest academic units according to students
There was one metric we didn’t include in our overall score: “Course Workload.”
The academic unit with the highest “Course Workload” was the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, followed by the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Physics, the Division of Anatomy, and the Department of Physiology.
According to students, the units with the lowest “Course Workload” were the Centre for Ethics with the lowest, followed by Faculty of Music, Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, Centre for Medieval Studies, and Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies.
Do bigger academic units have lower scores?
To determine the size of the academic units, The Varsity used data on the number of students enrolled in courses offered by the units. The data did not differentiate between students enrolled with the unit as a program of study and students enrolled in the course for other reasons.
There was a weak association between smaller units ranking higher and larger units ranking lower.
“Being a cinema studies specialist, almost every student is… a familiar face. You see everyone around, and in that sense, it’s really easy to build a strong sense of community,” Derro said in an interview with The Varsity.
Akil Huang — a fourth-year math specialist and statistics major at UTSG — said the rapidly growing size of the statistics department might be part of the reason the department struggles to teach students well.
In the 2013-2014 academic school year there were 4,934 students recorded as completing statistics courses compared to 9,800 in 2023-2024.
“I can only assume… that it’s because these departments are so large that the teaching experience naturally has to be worse for… students because they get less one-on-one time with the professors,” he said to The Varsity.
Course evaluation response rates
The average response rate for courses across the academic units was 43.18 per cent. The lowest was from the Departments of Pharmacology & Toxicology, followed by the Department of Biochemistry and Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies. The highest was from the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, followed by Wordsworth College and the Division of Anatomy.
The university did not comment on the results of our analysis, but a U of T spokesperson wrote in an email to The Varsity that “The University of Toronto is committed to ensuring the quality of its academic programs, its teaching, and the learning experiences of its students. An essential component of our commitment to teaching excellence is the regular evaluation of courses by students.”
How we did this
This analysis provides the most extensive data on student opinions on academic units offering undergraduate courses that has ever been made publically available, as far as The Varsity can identify.
Original course evaluation data is accessible to all U of T students on Quercus. On a sidebar, we selected “Course Evals,” then “For Students,” then “Faculty of Arts & Science (Undergraduate),” to find a table of course evaluation data. This data includes data from almost every single course, but instructors can opt to not include any, and courses with less than five evaluations are automatically not included.
The Varsity does not know the exact number of courses that the data set is missing.
We scraped this data to acquire a spreadsheet to use in our analysis. This version does not include the names of instructors who taught each course during the analyzed year. From there, we filtered for the fall and winter semesters of the 2023–2024 academic school year.
We averaged eight of the nine presented metrics to find an “Overall Score” for each course, including:
- Item 1 (I found the course intellectually stimulating)
- Item 2 (The course provided me with a deep understanding of the subject manner)
- Item 3 (The instructor created a course atmosphere that was conducive to my learning)
- Item 4 (Course projects, assignments, tests, and/or exams improved my understanding of the course material)
- Item 5 (Course projects, assignments, tests, and/or exams provided opportunity for me to demonstrate an understanding of the course material)
- Item 6 (Overall, the quality of my learning experience in the course was:)
- Instructor generated enthusiasm
- I would recommend this course
We also studied the averages of “Course Workload” and “Response Rate,” which is the division of students who complete course evaluations versus those who were invited to complete them.
We did not include the metric for “Course Workload” in our Overall Score metric because workload does not necessarily indicate whether either option is good or bad.
To find the strength of the correlation between department course enrolments and average Overall Score, we found their r-squared value, which was 0.284.
On February 6, The Varsity removed a negative sign that was mistakenly in front of the r-squared value.
