Samad Hakani, Photography Editor

This year, a “revitalized” CourseTable is more popular than ever, drawing record numbers of clicks alongside the introduction of several new features.

CourseTable, originally created in 2012 and rebuilt by the Yale Computer Society in 2020, is an open-source website that presents data from Yale’s course catalog and evaluations database through an interactive user-friendly interface. A small team headed by YCS member Alex Schapiro ’26 introduced and updated several features last semester including mobile calendar view, friends, Google Calendar integration, worksheet summary, links to courses and more search options, as they wrote in an email to the Yale undergraduate community on Jan. 23. The email also included that the site has processed 5.26 million requests in the past month.

“It’s awesome to walk in the library and see everybody using a website that you’ve worked on,” Schapiro told the News. “It’s a great feeling.”

CourseTable has a complex history with the Yale administration. After Peter Xu ’14 and Harry Yu ’14 created Yale Blue Book +, which would eventually become CourseTable, in 2012, Yale’s administration became concerned about the site and shut it down in 2014.

While the CourseTable team no longer faces active resistance from administrators, Sida Chen ’26 — a developer on the team — said that administrators don’t seem to be in support of the platform, either. 

“Even though we face no push back, we also have no collaboration with the administration and this creates a lot of obstacles,” Chen told the News.

He explained how sometimes their work is blocked or limited because it is only possible to submit a certain number of information requests simultaneously in the Yale system.

A small group of unpaid volunteers in the Yale Computer Society runs CourseTable. The group uses data from Yale, with scripts that run through Yale’s course website at 3 a.m. each morning and a scraper that goes through Yale’s “archaic” course evaluations database semesterly.

Though the team does not plan to charge students for their work, Schapiro and Chen said that they hope to communicate with Yale administration and establish a mutually beneficial relationship. Students can also support the CourseTable team with donations.

“We would love if we could have a more official relationship where maybe we could be more fairly compensated for the work and utility and value that we’re creating on campus,” Schapiro told the News.

Part of the reason CourseTable initially received pushback from Yale is the same reason it is so popular with students: the site displays past students’ ratings and written responses about courses and professors in an accessible way. It can also function as a replacement for Yale’s in-house course website, Yale Course Search.

“That’s kind of the bread and butter of why our product is used,” Schapiro said.

Diana Contreras Niño ’27 said CourseTable is an invaluable resource when it comes to choosing classes for the next semester.

She said that she especially likes adding friends and being able to see past students’ evaluations for courses she is considering.

“CourseTable is so helpful because I can look at different layouts of potential schedules and see them visually on the ‘worksheet,’” Contreras told the News.

Schapiro noted that a computer science professor from Harvard reached out to him about using CourseTable at the school. Because CourseTable is open-source, the code can be adapted for use at peer universities.

Schapiro and Chen suspect that other institutions may use similar models to display course data, as well as ratemyprofessors.com.

The reason CourseTable is so successful at Yale specifically, Schapiro conjectured, is because Yale forces every student to evaluate their courses before viewing their grades, which creates a pool of information about every course — though last semester, Yale Hub’s grade suppression mechanism temporarily failed, allowing some students to bypass this requirement.

Chen told the News that CourseTable has room for improvement.

He said the team hopes to make the site more “uniform” and create more filters, as well as a slider for professor ratings.

“We want to work out a way where users can more intuitively interact with these gigantic numbers of features,” Chen said.

The small CourseTable team meets weekly. They have a roadmap, listing features they hope to add, and they divide tasks between members. The work is individually focused, but the team works in collaboration to maintain a uniform style and ask each other for help.

Team members explained that they constantly have new ambitions and goals for what they want to achieve next on their site.

“We want CourseTable to be the hub for everything about the courses at Yale,” Schapiro said.

Evaluations from last semester became available to Yale College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences faculty on Jan. 9.

Correction, Jan. 31: One quote in this article was misattributed; it has since been resolved.