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 | Course score |
|---|---|---|
| ECON 9902Fifth-Year Thesis Workshop | 40ECON | 96 |
| LAWS 8856MA Attorney General Civil Litigation Program | 20LAWS | 97 |
| PRTO 3300Senior Seminar in Business Ethics | 15PRTO | 98 |
| BSLW 2299Real Estate Field Projects | 15BSLW | 97 |
| PHIL 4932Perspectives Seminar | 11PHIL | 98 |
| LAWS 8308Compassionate Release & Parole Clinic | 10LAWS | 98 |
| SCWK 9960Regression Analysis for Social and Behavioral Sciences | 8SCWK | 99 |
| EESC 9901Doctoral Continuation | 7EESC | 100 |
| MUSP 1660Middle East Astaza! Music Ensemble | 14MUSP | 96 |
| UGMG 1010Perspectives on Management | 10UGMG | 98 |
How this list is orderedPositions 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.
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.
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.
Out of 100, not out of 5
Boston College scores on a 1–5 agreement scale. We print it ×20 — a 5 shows as 100, a 4 as 80 — the way these numbers were printed for years. 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.