Shopping, amiright? The necessity of choosing courses around which to plan the semester seems to have overwhelmed all other conversations in the Yale campus’s collective small-talk repertoire. If you — like we — have been working variations on a theme of “I don’t even know what I’m gonna take, I just don’t know, maybe I won’t even take any classes, I just can’t even decide, it’s just too much,” you’ll be thrilled — or dismayed — to learn of a new addition to your decision-making toolkit.

Meet YalePlus Bluebook. Based on a comprehensive spreadsheet of all Yale classes, this site takes ratings from student evaluations, quantifies them, and orders them in all kinds of different ways. The result is that you can look at a list of classes and arrange them by a criterion of interest, selecting out for favorite subjects or needed skills credits or workload or, like, basically anything else.

Screw around with this site to your heart’s content — we’re telling ourselves that work just isn’t real during shopping period — but here’s the program’s list of Yale’s 15 best classes and its one of the 15 easiest classes.* Check em out, and see you in Classics in Africa and the Black Diaspora tomorrow!

Best classes, arranged by rating:

  1. 5.00: CLCV 238: Classics in Africa and the Black Diaspora (3.60 work)
  2. 4.97: PLSC 240: Public Schools and Public Policy (4.43 work)
  3. 4.89: HUMS 427: The Practice of Literary Translation (3.89 work)
  4. 4.89: ENGL 455: Writing About Oneself (4.11 work)
  5. 4.88: ENGL 134: Reading Fiction for Craft (2.86 work)
  6. 4.87: ENGL 120 (Section 3): Reading and Writing the Modern Essay (Ehrgood) (3.77 work)
  7. 4.87: MB&B 445: Methods and Logic in Molecular Biology (3.01 work)
  8. 4.86: ART 121: Introductory Sculpture: Metal (2.85 work)
  9. 4.86: HIST 207J: Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War (3.88 work)
  10. 4.86: MB&B 230: Rain Forest Expedition and Laboratory (3.20 work)
  11. 4.86: F&ES 726: Observing Earth from Space (4.00 work)
  12. 4.86: ENGL 127 (Section 5): Readings in American Literature (Deming) (3.94 work)
  13. 4.85: SAST 459: Buddhist Traditions of Mind and Meditation (3.46 work)
  14. 4.85: MUSI 337: Sondheim and American Musical Theater (3.08 work)
  15. 4.84: MUSI 322: Analyzing, Directing, and Performing Early Opera (3.22 work)

 

Easiest classes, arranged by workload:

  1. 1.66: ART 114 (Section 2): Basic Drawing (4.13 rating)
  2. 1.68: MUSI 334: Analysis&PerformanceEarlyMusic (4.46 rating)
  3. 1.79: MUSI 219: Elementary Musicianship II (3.90 rating)
  4. 1.80: MUSI 218: Elementary Musicianship I (4.28 rating)
  5. 1.80: GMAN 191: Problems of Lyric (4.15 rating)
  6. 1.81: AFAM 178: From West Africa to the Black Americas: The Black Atlantic Visual Tradition (3.83 rating)
  7. 1.86: SCIE 031: Current Topics in Science (3.87 rating)
  8. 1.98: APHY 050: Science of Modern Technology (3.56 rating)
  9. 1.99: HIST 133: Dilemmas of the Nuclear Age (3.16 rating)
  10. 1.99: PLSC 415: Religion and Politics (3.23 rating)
  11. 2.00: LITR 465: Travel and Quests in Early World Literature (4.71)
  12. 200: ZULU 120: Beginning isiZulu II (4.40 rating)
  13. 2.00: MUS 530: Intermediate Conducting (3.95 rating)
  14. 2.00: THST 211 (Section 1): Intermediate Acting (4.00 rating)
  15. 2.00: PHYS 344: Quantum and Nanoscale Physics (3.90 rating)

 

 

* Note: We’re sorry to tell you that we didn’t feel like expending the extra effort to account for ties in this list. You’re Yale students, figure it out yourselves. Happy hunting!