The reviews are written by Brown students from course evaluation questionnaires distributed to class members in the final days of the academic semester.

There was no set process for putting the magazine together, and since the questionnaires were different for different classes, the course summaries varied significantly in terms of what information they presented and emphasized.

"There must be a better way than having three people slave over questionnaires in the UCS office for two summer months," wrote the editors on the cover page of one of the first editions, "A more rational, uniform process must be developed."

The editors introduced the now standard two-reviews-per-page format, with bar graphs, which were meant to depict the general distribution of student responses.

Nevertheless, having found a satisfactory and manageable system to which Brown students and faculty responded favorably, subsequent editors changed relatively little about the format, process, and policy of the Critical Review over the next few years.

He established new policy for the organization which created lasting precedent: "Because we solely represent student opinion, the Critical Review no longer prints any department-sponsored articles and cannot use departmental evaluations."

As Popofsky wrote, "This issue marks the culmination of what has been a personal crusade of mine for the past year: to publish the Critical Review in time for preregistration."

In 1991 the Critical Review began to publish "Insights from Student Surveys," which quickly evolved into a regular feature called "Funny Quotes."

The accelerated production cycle, combined with limited computing resources available to editors, resulted in a few editions of the magazine that contained significant errors.

Rebecca More, Professor of history at Brown and Director of the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, was one of the faculty members who worked with Anderson on this project.

Unfortunately, the frequency with which the Critical Review published errors at this time, to some extent due to understaffing, prevented many instructors from taking a renewed interest.

"We asked each student who filled out a [questionnaire] to tell us whether she believed that the hard copy of The Critical Review should continue to exist, and the reply was 'yes' in overwhelming numbers [...].

Among other things, this document brought to light concerns about the overall goals of the organization, institutional memory, faculty and student perceptions, and persistent internal difficulties.

Partly in response to these issues, the editors hosted a "Faculty Forum" in December 2004 to seek suggestions and feedback from instructors about Critical Review policy and the questionnaires themselves.

Schade supplemented his report with other documents to produce a Critical Review "Chief Editor's Resource" in April 2005 so that these records could be further augmented, edited, and passed on to future editorial teams.

In 2007, despite the efforts of Editors-in-Chief Ariana Cannavo '08 and Dara Steinberg '09, UFB eliminated the entire printing budget, instructing the Critical Review to be a web-only publication.

Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Romig worked with Brown's IT department to set up a system where professors would first opt-in to allow the Critical Review to evaluate their course.

In addition to assisting groups of Writers, Editors also handle all final editing of the reviews and create the actual page layouts that are combined and sent to the publisher to form the magazine.