Coursemash

Coursemash turns the Brown course catalog into a head-to-head popularity vote. Pick whichever course sounds better and the leaderboard slowly sorts itself out.

It's just for fun — a way to browse the catalog, not a substitute for official academic advising or the registrar.

Every matchup is scored with the Elo rating system, the same method used to rank chess players:

• Each course starts on equal footing.
• Winning a matchup nudges a course's rating up; losing nudges it down.
• Beating a course that's currently ranked higher moves the rating more than beating one ranked lower — an upset counts for more.
• Matchups favor courses with fewer votes so far, so the whole catalog gets a fair number of head-to-heads instead of a handful of courses hogging attention.

Only each course's rank position is ever shown — the underlying rating number stays behind the scenes.

Coursemash doesn't ask who you are, and it doesn't want to know:

• No accounts, sign-ins, cookies, or device fingerprinting.
• The only thing saved is which course beat which course — never who voted.
• Vote totals are shared across everyone using the page so the leaderboard reflects the whole crowd.

If you spot unexpected behavior, the safest move is to close the tab — nothing personal was ever stored to begin with.