Coursedog, a software company that sells academic operations tools to colleges and universities, said on April 20, 2026 that it had acquired ClassRanked, a course evaluation platform for higher education. Terms were not disclosed.
ClassRanked will become the Course Evaluations product within Coursedog's Assessment Cloud. The aim is to let institutions feed student feedback on teaching straight into the systems they use for curriculum, class scheduling and accreditation reporting.
Hayden Hall, ClassRanked's founder and chief executive, is joining Coursedog to lead the Assessment Cloud. Coursedog said ClassRanked's team and its domain expertise would come with the deal.
What ClassRanked built
Course evaluations are the end-of-term surveys in which students rate their classes and instructors. Coursedog said colleges have long struggled with low response rates, scattered tools and evaluation data kept outside the systems where decisions about academic quality are made.
ClassRanked's answer was a mobile-friendly evaluation platform that uses AI and is designed around the student. It offers real-time dashboards for faculty and built-in connections to student information systems (SIS) and learning management systems (LMS), the two core pieces of campus software. Coursedog said the product consistently produced higher completion rates.
The company is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, according to the announcement.
“We started ClassRanked because we believed course evaluations could do more than check a box.”
Why Coursedog is buying
Coursedog describes itself as an Intelligent Academic Operations Platform. Its software covers course scheduling, curriculum management, catalogues and assessment. The Assessment Cloud already helps institutions keep track of assessment plans and learning outcomes and produce reports for accreditors. Adding course evaluations places direct student feedback next to that outcome data.
"We continue to hear from our clients that they want student feedback flowing directly into the systems where curriculum gets updated, catalogs and schedules get built, and accreditation reports get generated," said Andrew Rosen, Coursedog's chief executive.
"We're giving institutions the ability to move from insight to action and action to outcomes, faster than ever," Rosen added. Coursedog said the addition of course evaluations would give colleges another tool for their assessment work and for measuring institutional effectiveness.
Hall said joining Coursedog gives ClassRanked "the scale and the connected platform to deliver on that mission", referring to the company's goal of making course evaluations more than a box-ticking exercise.
From a Duke dorm project to campus software
ClassRanked was founded at Duke University in 2018 by Hayden Hall, Max Labaton and Dilan Trivedi during their junior year, according to Wikipedia. The three had spent hours hunting for courses that met their degree requirements at registration time, and they built a site that combined official course evaluations, grade distribution data and student reviews.
The site collected more than 1,200 reviews in its first week at Duke, and within a month more than 80% of the student body was using it, Wikipedia says. In August 2019 it expanded to the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill and Emory University. By October 2020 it served more than 350 colleges and universities. The company later shifted toward selling evaluation and survey software to the institutions themselves.
ClassRanked's funding has not been publicly reported.
The buyer's own backing
Coursedog was itself founded in 2018. In March 2023 it announced a $90 million strategic growth investment from JMI Equity, Pulse 2.0 reported at the time. Wikipedia's entry on ClassRanked names JMI Equity alongside Coursedog as an acquirer, but Coursedog's announcement describes the purchase as Coursedog's alone. Coursedog was founded by Justin Wenig and Nicholas Diao, and at the time of the 2023 investment Wenig said JMI had been chosen for its record with mission-driven businesses that serve higher education.
When that investment was announced, Pulse 2.0 described Coursedog's platform as helping institutions with curriculum planning, course scheduling, event management and catalogue management. The Assessment Cloud, which Hall now leads, extends that set of tools into the measurement of what students learn.
Coursedog did not say how many institutions use ClassRanked or how many ClassRanked employees are joining the company.
