Grade Disparities and Accolades by Instructor at UIUC
By: Lauren Hyde, Rittika Adhikari, Michael Kokkines, Ophir Sneh, Caren Zeng, and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider Published: April 11, 2025
Introduction
Past GPA visualizations have explored grade disparities. However, an instructor's grade distribution is not the only factor that students consider when selecting sections. Instructor quality is an important consideration; many UIUC professors are luminaries in their fields, and many are renowned as teachers.
This work attempts to celebrate high-caliber professors while still providing important GPA distribution information. As shown below, the visualization consists of two major components: the first is a breakdown of an instructor's grades, and the second is a listing of accolades the professor has received.
As an example, CHEM 332: Elementary Organic Chem II has been taught by several faculty in recent years who have a collection of prestigious awards. Specifically, Professor Jeffrey Moore has been honored with:
Membership in the National Academies, which is among the most prestigious honor any professor can receive,
Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, a top teaching award at The University of Illinois
★★★Ranked as Outstanding/Excellent by his students at the end-of-semester evaluations,
Other instructors, like Dr. Smitha Pillai, who has started teaching CHEM 332 only recently we indicate that there's minimal accolades we would be expect to collect:
★Ranked as Excellent by her students at the end-of-semester evaluations,
New Prep, indicating she recently started teaching the course and may have minimal accolades for excellent teaching.
In addition, a breakdown of GPAs is provided for each course and instructor. This visualization is interactive, tap or mouseover any part of the visualization for more details:
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