Carney Curve — look up a Boston College professor
A surname gets you that professor's record — their overall score, and where they rank on challenge and workload against the whole university. A course code (try CSCI 1101) gets you that class's board. 3,630 instructors, 5,306 classes and 32,066 evaluation records on file.
Pick a department from the strip above and you get its standings — every instructor in it with enough records to rank, each with their overall score and their challenge and workload ranks. It averages a person across the different classes they teach, so it is a way in, not a like-for-like comparison.
Scores are real averages. The order also accounts for how many records back each one, so a class rated by six students does not outrank one rated by forty.
| Class | Records | Curve score |
|---|---|---|
| PRTO 3300Senior Seminar in Business Ethics | 15PRTO | 98+6 easiness |
| UNAS 3348Cross Currents Seminar: Thinking about Resilience | 36UNAS | 90+6 easiness |
| MUSP 1670Waaw Waaw Sabar: BC West African Music Ensemble | 14MUSP | 94+6 easiness |
| COMM 1060Anti-Social Media | 17COMM | 92+5 easiness |
| MUSP 1660Middle East Astaza! Music Ensemble | 14MUSP | 92+2 easiness |
| ECON 9902Fifth-Year Thesis Workshop | 40ECON | 88−2 easiness |
| BSLW 2299Real Estate Field Projects | 15BSLW | 91±0 easiness |
| PHIL 4932Perspectives Seminar | 11PHIL | 93+1 easiness |
| COMM 1902Digital Storytelling | 15COMM | 90+6 easiness |
| UGMG 1010Perspectives on Management | 10UGMG | 93+2 easiness |
This ranks the classes themselves, not the people who teach them. Open one to see its board: everyone who has taught it, ranked on their record in that class.
How this list is ordered
Positions account for how many records stand behind each number, so one perfect review does not outrank a semester of them. Every score shown is the real average — only the ordering is adjusted.
The three numbers
Overall is the blended rating, out of 100. Challenge is Boston College's “intellectually challenging” item — a question students answer positively about courses that stretched them, so it is not a measure of difficulty or grading. Workload is “workload”, which BC reports as one of five bands rather than as a number of hours; it does not publish what the bands mean, so neither do we.
Challenge and workload are shown as a RANK against every class we hold, not as a score. Almost every BC class scores in the high eighties on almost every question, so a raw number there would tell you nothing.
None of the three is coloured good or bad. A demanding professor is not a worse professor; the student decides what they are looking for.
How the blend works
Each source is also weighted by how many records stand behind it, so a page with a hundred ratings moves the number and a page with three does not. Every page that shows a blend shows the parts it was made from.
Scores are curved
Boston College scores on a 1–5 agreement scale, and it is bunched hard at the top: the median instructor averages about 88 out of 100 on it and 44% of them clear 90. So we rank every figure against the rest of BC and print that rank back out of 100. A 77 is the median, 84 is the top quarter, 91 is the top tenth. On top of that sits an easiness adjustment worth up to about ±6 — the workload rank turned over, so lighter classes gain and heavier ones lose, while an ordinary workload changes nothing — and each page prints it, signed. Nothing here is ever converted into hours. A dash means the question was not reported; it is never a zero, and an unrated instructor never appears in a ranking.