CULPA, or Columbia Underground Listing of Professor Ability, has announced the launch of their website redesign. The new page is scheduled to go live on September 10.

Online course registration, regardless of greater global circumstances, is a messy (and sometimes unbearable) process for all. We are all familiar with the discomfort of choosing between two professors you have never heard of or courses with one-sentence descriptions. So in those moments of uncertainty, when our friends can’t give us the inside scoop, we turn to our most trusted Columbia pal who we know always provides the good honest truth, CULPA.

CULPA, in the words of those who run the site, provides “a guerilla checks-and-balance system against the great Powers That Be.” The Columbia-specific course and professor review site has been a valuable resource to students since 1997. The site aims to collect students’ honest and personal experiences to provide peers with better insight into the true nature of a course or professor.

This year, CULPA got an upgrade. Gone are the days of the archaic user interface – CULPA now has a much more modern aesthetic that matches more current web designs. The interface also highlights CULPA’s push to get more students to write reviews, now made easy via a big orange button in the middle of the page. They hope that by making the review-writing process more apparent and accessible, students will be more inclined to add their own experiences, ultimately improving the reliability of the site. Additionally, search bar functions now incorporate autocomplete for a simpler search experience.

The updated site will retain its nuggets feature as another way to indicate the performance of a professor. Nuggets (gold, silver, and bronze) honor the consistently positive performance of a professor relative to all professors throughout Columbia’s schools. Nuggets take into account the top percentage of professors, recency of reviews, and the number of reviews given. With these three constantly-updated criteria in play, a gold-nugget professor is a reliable indicator of a high-quality course.

The updated site is scheduled to go live on September 10, just in time for shopping period, so get ready to head over to culpa.info and write some reviews!

Update 9/11 12:15 PM: As of now, CULPA has not yet been updated due to issues encountered when trying to launch the new site. We will update this post once the site has been updated.

CULPA homepage via CULPA