MIT SIPB launches the beta version of OpenGrades, a fully anonymous course evaluation platform
OpenGrades has seen over 1300 reviews distributed over 500 different classes
On Dec. 12, 2024, MIT’s Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) launched a beta version of OpenGrades, a platform where students can anonymously share information about classes at MIT since Fall 2021. On OpenGrades, users can post class reviews and numeric or letter grades they received in their classes. Additionally, users can submit class-specific documents that include syllabi and assignments, information that is currently inaccessible on the Institute’s subject evaluation reports.
Senior Mohamed Suufi ’25 began developing OpenGrades in June 2022. What motivated Suufi to develop OpenGrades was his dissatisfaction with the MIT’s course evaluations. The reports consist of numerical ratings of various questions on a scale from 1 to 7; student feedback and other information like grade cutoffs are not published. “What does it mean that you rated the class 5 out of 7?” Suufi said. “What cost you those two points?”
As a result, information such as grade cutoffs often involve asking previous students who took the class. However, Suufi noted that it was hard to pinpoint exact answers. For instance, he recalled his frustration when upperclassmen “told me [the cutoff was] like a 70” for a particular class but others “told me it's a 60.” Suufi also mentioned challenges in obtaining other types of information like tips and advice because knowledge about a class primarily gets passed down by word of mouth. “There’s so much information that’s just lost, and the only way it gets down is from seniors to freshmen,” Suufi said. “So I wanted to fix that.”
Besides issues with the course evaluation system, another factor that inspired Suufi to start OpenGrades was encountering the Harvard Syllabus Explorer when he cross-registered at Harvard. The Syllabus Explorer allows students to search and download course syllabi regardless of their class registration status. This accessible feature inspired Suufi to replicate this tool when developing OpenGrades. “I was like, ‘why don’t we have that?’” Suufi said.
After spending two years developing the code base for OpenGrades, Suufi collaborated with SIPB for testing and troubleshooting in the later stages of development before its initial release in Dec. 2024. SIPB Chair Inna Voloshchuk ’27 and SIPB Keyholder Diego Temkin ’26 helped with the project.
As of this writing, OpenGrades has over 600 activated users, with 1350 reviews distributed over some 500 unique classes. Yet only around 400 of these reviews are what Suufi considers full reviews. According to Suufi, full reviews are defined as reviews that contain class-specific details, rather than just a grade or a short text. First-year undergraduates account for more than one-third of the users, while graduate students make up just 2%.
Despite some bugs upon its release, OpenGrades has been received positively by students. Ekaterina Tiukhtikova ’28 noted its helpfulness in filling out spring pre-registration, and Grayson Bertaina ’25 supported its goal of academic transparency and “would have utilized it heavily” as a first-year had it been available earlier. Sydney Saenz ’26 said that some of their classes are “very secretive” about cutoffs, adding that "OpenGrades could let me know where I stand grade-wise in a class."
While OpenGrade’s 200 weekly users and steadily accumulating reviews have “definitely surprised” Suufi, some of its popularity still stems from a Dormspam raffle incentive that ended on January 15. To retain interest, Suufi has considered establishing long-term cash incentives or making site access contingent on a certain number of reviews per semester.
He also thinks that stigma around sharing grades, especially grades below an A, has stifled some interest and inflated grade averages on the site. Despite this, he holds hope that increased OpenGrades usage will normalize grade transparency at MIT. “I think all these data points are very valuable, especially when they deviate from what is considered okay,” Suufi said. According to Suufi, the new OpenGrades feature allowing for direct grade report uploads is expected to ease this normalization.
One of OpenGrades’s defining characteristics is its anonymity for student reviewers and the lack of access to faculty, as this is enforced by MIT Touchstone login. Unlike traditional course evaluations, OpenGrade reviews are visible to students and invisible to professors. When confronted with the possibility that instructors might see leaked reviews, Suufi expressed doubt that any student would be “tight [enough] with their professor.”He also did not support the possibility that reviews could be “trace[d] back to an individual student.” In case of abuse, Suufi added a report button that flags suspicious or inaccurate reviews. But it has seen no use so far.
As for future directions, Suufi will focus on attracting students, particularly upperclassmen and graduate students that can review less frequently taken upper-division classes. In this vein, he hopes to separate reviews for undergraduate and graduate versions of the same classes, which frequently have different assignments and grade cutoffs. In addition, Suufi plans to make some usage statistics public and design a file-hosting system to store syllabi. Finally, he plans to grant recent alumni and past affiliates access to the website.
“It’s relatively new to the MIT community,” Suufi said. “But I think over time, I hope more people are open to sharing information about classes or their grades.”