Columbia Underground Listing of Professor Ability

The Columbia Underground Listing of Professor Ability (CULPA) is a professor ratings site which allows students to anonymously post their own reviews of their professors. The site is the main source of professor review currently available to the Columbia student body.

CULPA is not officially affiliated with the university.

Reputation

CULPA is regarded as one of the most useful tools for students looking to enroll in a class, boasting over 10,000 reviews.

However, because of the candid nature of the submissions (students tend to use CULPA to praise professors they like and slag off those they do not), the site has occasionally been accused of harboring biased reviews and misrepresenting professors (both positively and negatively).

History

CULPA was founded in 1997 by Alex Feerst, CC '98. After Feerst graduated, the site continued to be operated by Jonathan McCarter, CC '98. However, at some point between 1998 and 2000, CULPA suffered an untimely demise. The site would have disappeared completely, except for the fact that the Columbia University Marching Band inexplicably decided to keep a copy of CULPA backed up on their servers. In 2000, Ashran Jen, CC '00, and Ben Wheeler, SEAS '00, resurrected the site from its (figurative) ashes on the Columbia University Marching Band servers. Morris Doueck (CC '03) and Nat Lin (CC '04), took over from Ashran and Ben. Ben Falik (CC '04) and Pam Terry (BC '06) joined the team in 2002. When Nat and Ben graduated, Jonathan Wegener (CC '07) and Carly Baratt (CC '06) filled their shoes. And in Pam and Carly's year of graduation, Michael Decker (CC '09) and Seth Berliner (CC '08) joined. In 2008, Ron Gejman (CC '10), a programmer, joined the staff as well. Since August 2008, there are indications of that an overhaul to the website is underway. This overhaul has yet to occur. From time to time the CULPA website stops working, but so far it has always resurfaced.

Starting around 2020, the site fell into neglect both by its developers and its users, and even became inaccessible at some point. This prompted the creation of new CULPA sites, notably culpa.app which claimed to be the official version run by the "actual CULPA admins", and culpa.io, an open-source, modernized version that also included the ability to review dorms, dining halls, libraries and more. The team behind culpa.app showed some hostility towards culpa.io, because it used what they saw as their reserved name. The validity of their claims was supported by the fact that they later managed to re-acquire the original culpa.info domain and told the creator of culpa.io that they had passed CULPA onto a group of students that failed to maintain it. In November of 2022, the Columbia Daily Spectator acquired CULPA, including the culpa.info domain (supposedly off said actual admins). In early 2023, both culpa.app and culpa.io were configured to redirect to culpa.info, therefore making Spec's version the only accessible version of CULPA today. The creator and maintainer of culpa.io (the open-source version) explained on Reddit that he took down his site when asked to do so by the new owners, and expressed support for this new chapter of CULPA, confident that improvements are on the way.

"Rivals"

Some students have been trying to get the administration to set up an official professor review site using the results of the official course evaluations.

There also exists a largely useless website called The SEAS Oracle.

External links

• CULPA website
• Archive of culpa.io reviews
• Introduction/presentation of culpa.io on Reddit
• Introduction/presentation of culpa.app on Reddit The post has been removed by moderators, but is still accessible using the Wayback Machine
• Reddit post about the closing of culpa.io featuring explanations from its author
• A more recent Reddit post about culpa.io also featuring a comment from its author