Grinnell College Course Database

Introduction

Welcome to the Grinnell College Course Database! This website is for anyone interested in exploring the courses offered at Grinnell College. The database contains information on courses, professors, their office hours, as well as sentiment analysis of syllabi. Originally starting with classes for the History department, the database has also expanded to the Statistics department.

On this website, you can download the data, explore what professors offer a class you're interested in and identify the right professsor for you! You can also take a glance at some of the tools we used to analyze syllabi in the sentiment analysis section.

Data

This database was built with the help of the Registrar and the Dean's Office in obtaining a list of courses and their syllabi. Information on professor and classes were also obtained by scraping the Grinnell College website and parsing through syllabi. All data is that from Fall 2007 to Spring 2025.

The following data is accessible to download for each department:
course.csv
A list of all courses offered
course_offering.csv
A list of courses for each semester including the professor, the number of credit, the number of enrolled students, and the classroom the class was held in.
prof_info.csv
The names, titles, phone numbers, emails, office addresses, and CVs of professors who have taught in the department
office_hours.csv
The office hours for each class in a semester
syllabus_info.csv
Results of a sentiment analysis as well as the number of grammatical errors for each syllabus.

For a detailed explanation of all of the variables in the dataset, please refer to the codebook: Codebook (PDF)