A few years ago, Rutgers decided to let students fill out these surveys online. While some professors still hand out physical surveys in class, the majority of students are asked to fill in the bubbles via Sakai. Every response since 2001 is located on a website run by the Center for Teaching Assessment and Academic Research (CTAAR).

Imagine if you could use the results of these surveys to come up with trends and see what students have thought about certain professors, departments, or even the school as a whole. That could be pretty powerful if done properly — and is exactly what we had in mind when we began this project.

In this series of posts, we’re going to show you the extent of the Rutgers academic web and the quality of the best and worst rated departments and teachers from the past 12 years. We’ll show you how many courses Rutgers offers and the average class size alongside lists of classes with the most students enrolled. We’ll point out interesting conclusions about the university’s SIRS results and show you why they matter.

Methodology & Data

Months ago, we asked CTAAR for the raw SIRS data. They denied that request, saying we had access to the SIRS database through their website, which requires a NetID (Rutgers user account). Without their help, we were forced to resort to screen scraping — generating links to pages that contained the results and collecting it from there — the data ourselves.

In order to pull all of the SIRS results, we needed to figure out how to easily access each individual survey result. We found that if we knew every subject offered at every school in every semester in every year, we could generate individual links to every survey result. We used a program to visit over 9,000 web pages, spending between eight and 12 seconds between every page. Following each of our generated links brought us to surveys of every course section offered.

We also grabbed school and subject descriptions so that we could better understand the numbers.

But how do you go from a web page to a database? Next, we created spreadsheets with the information and moved it all over to database software (specifically, MySQL) for analysis. In all, we compiled 140,000 records of individual survey results spanning Spring 2001 through Spring 2013. Since the original data was under lock and key via NetID, we’ve decided we’re not going to post the dump here; we’re only going provide our analysis of it.

Looking Down on the Data

These are some trends over time that we have analyzed. Hover over the graphs or click them for more information.

Look at the organizational chart below and you’ll see that Rutgers is a mass of interconnected departments and schools. Use the arrows on the top left to see the web in greater or less detail. Note that some schools are no longer in existence and this information might not reflect what the academic structure looks like today, specifically in regard to the recent merger Rutgers with UMDNJ.

To view this in a separate window, go here and click on the chart tab.

The data also gave us the opportunity to see how many instructors have been at Rutgers over the past 12 years. The numbers represent every uniquely displayed instructor name, which means the results might not be accurate (many of the surveys contained no name at all). Similarly named instructors or names organized in different ways make this graph not entirely accurate, especially as it related to former UMDNJ faculty.

Total Number of Instructors: 30,442



The schools with the most instructors?

1) New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences

2) Graduate School of New Brunswick

3) Newark School of Arts and Science

The number of courses available to students has risen significantly since 2008.

Professors and students claiming class sizes are getting bigger might want to take a look at this chart. According to the data, the average amount of students enrolled in a class has generally remained steady over the years.

Students seem to also have stopped caring about the surveys in recent years, despite the administration’s claim that the response rate (the number of students who filled out the survey divided by the enrollment) for the online surveys for each semester ranges on average between 50% to 65%. The decent drop in survey participation seems to correspond with the university’s decision several years back to switch from paper to digital surveys.

Though average class sizes have remained the same, there are always individual classes with hundreds of people in them. Here is a list of the top 10 classes with the most students on average since 2001.



1. Soul Beliefs — 454 students

2. Normality and Abnormality — 452 students

3. Psychology of Art — 451 students

4. General Biology — 451 students

5. Organic Chemistry — 420 students

6. Introduction to Art History — 409 students

7. Health Psychology — 399 students

8. Psychology of Art — 395 students

9. Global Environment — 387 students

10. General Chemistry — 380 students



Note: Psychology of Art appears twice because it had two different names in the SIRS database.

Stay tuned for part II.

This post begins a three-part series on Rutgers’ Student Instructional Rating Surveys.