Where can I find publicly available course ratings from Computer Science departments?
Normally formal course evaluations are used for internal university purposes only. Personnel information like this (performance measures that can be used in tenure decisions and the like) is sensitive. I would be very surprised to find such information publicly available. You might have better success contacting departments directly and discussing your project with them, and explaining what safeguards you will take with the data.
UCSD posts professor ratings for every class. The method of collection for the data on that website is extremely standardized and about as complete as you can get; CAPE sends students to every class above a certain size on campus near the end of every quarter and students fill in the forms during the first ten minutes of class (ie it’s not at the end of class so people actually do stay to fill them out). They also announce that the ratings are used to make decisions about tenure, pay, awards, and promotions, so students generally take them pretty seriously. It used to be the case that these were all published in a huge book that was available for like 5 dollars at the beginning of the year, and they’d include snippets from the backside of the evaluation sheet, where people would write hilarious comments. Those days are gone, but I think CAPE has been around of and on since the 1980s so if you wanted to delve back in time you could probably get old
