Introduction
Throughout the Winter 2002 quarter, the project group CAPErs diligently created an interface to view Course And Professor Evaluations (CAPE). CAPE is an organization on campus at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) that hands out evaluations to students towards the end of each quarter. These evaluations are a statistical way of representing a generic overall rating for each UCSD class. Students fill out the evaluations and turn them in with marked bubbles indicating their feelings on a certain topic. CAPE then compiles these statistics into six categories: course ratings, professor ratings, average study time, 4th week enrollment, student comments received, and questionnaires returned, as well as having a section with student comments. The class statistics are then published in a thick black and white book as a resource for students who are registering for classes.

Motivations
Our project developed from the need to view the CAPE ratings in a more cognitively enhancing way. What we mean by cognitively enhancing is to let the user perform less computational tasks and change these into perceptual tasks. Therefore, the basic concept of the project is to provide undergraduate students and their professors with a means to quickly and easily view the ratings put forth by the CAPE organization.

What Can it Do?
Our interface allows the user to do multiple tasks. The user encounters a task based navigation at the beginning of the website that will guide the user towards what they desire from our website. The website allows the user to find one course, compare two courses, and find the top two performers of a particular category. All of these options can be completed quickly provided the user does not come to our website completely clueless. This task-based navigation is one of three ways to navigate the site.

A zooming feature has been implemented to view class statistics as well. If the user is at one of the category pages (lower division, core, or electives), the screen shows adjacent boxes marked with the class numbers of that particular category. A rollover on one of these changes the color of that particular class box while a click on that box zooms the user into that class’s particular rating. This zooming eliminates the user not knowing what is going on “behind the scenes” of the website. The user can feel as if he or she is zooming into that particular class box.

The third navigational form is a “Jump to Course” menu that lists every category and what courses are contained within each category. A simple rollover on the “Jump to Course” button opens the menu and the user can quickly select which category to choose from and then which class to view the ratings for.

So, our interface provides multiple options for viewing the course statistics provided by CAPE. The task-based navigation along with the zooming feature and the jump menu combine to form a very interactive website that provides the user with the necessary Cognitive Science CAPE ratings. Not only is the site enjoyable to navigate, but the user also obtains all the desired information about the Cognitive Science CAPE ratings.

My Contributions to the Team