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Preparing for New Ratings System

In January we will start in earnest on rewriting the "Student Ratings" system. The system is to allow students to rate their professors and the courses they are taking. (I am hoping we can change the name of the system to better reflect what it does. We aren't rating the students, after all. That is what grades are for.)

Gene and I had a good conversation with Nate W. and Tom M. today about the general design principles of the system. This is a project where we are going to try out our model of having separate teams work on the UI and the web services and treat them as parallel projects. Our hope is that we can get better and more reliable web services if they are ONLY way to talk to a system rather than just the tack-on way that the main programmers don't use because direct-to-database is faster.

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