WHEN YOU buy a new car, you can shop around before making your final decision. Music stores have listening stations so you can sample the newest CD's before throwing down $15. Movie reviews let you know which films are hits and which are stinkers.
Unfortunately, you have to make some decisions in life with a lot less of this kind of helpful information. Registering for courses at the University is one such case. It doesn't have to be that way.
Registration isn't a complete shot in the dark though. Having ISIS available online instead of over the phone is a great step towards better registration. Students can read a little bit about classes in the Undergraduate Record. But this information is just the tip of the iceberg for what most students want and need to help them make their final decisions. As it now stands, students have no way of finding out what classes really are like.
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Right now word of mouth is the only basis students have to discover the real type of class they're considering. It's important for some students to know how fast the note taking pace is. It's important for some students to find out how much reading is involved. It's important for every student to find out if the professor actually cares about teaching.
Each semester, professors hand out course evaluations in the last few weeks of class. These ask students to answer questions ranging anywhere from an instructor's speaking skills to how well he is prepared. But as long as students don't get to find out the results of these evaluations, filling them out is a waste of our time. They may help professors attempt to improve their faults, but this improvement isn't always assured, and students will never know if their comments were taken to heart.
There is an obvious and not so obvious solution to this problem. These evaluations could be compiled into a packet of information that would be made available to students at registration time. Students could find out which professors best gelled with their learning needs and styles. This information would be key when selecting a satisfactory schedule. Knowing beforehand what a class and a professor are like surely would alleviate some of the mass confusion that occurs during the add-drop period.
This is the case at other schools. At the University of Miami the student government administers a mandatory evaluation in every class each semester. They then compile the results into a book about the size of our Course Offering Directory. This is exactly the kind of feedback students at the University need.
There are some problems with this system though. It would cost a lot of money to compile thousands of these evaluation packets. Also, it would take countless hours of compiling to get it ready in time for registration. There is also the problem that our current evaluations are different for every department, so it would be difficult to come up with quantitative data that would hold for each department.
This leads to a less obvious but possible solution: Slam Tables. During registration week at the University of Texas at Austin, dozens of paper-covered tables pop up outside the main library. The tables are separated by department, and under each heading lay hundreds of quips scrawled with whatever writing utensil is available. These serve as cheap and easy ways for students to give and receive anonymous feedback about everything they could ever want to know about a class or a professor. It's that simple.
University of Texas sophomore Ifeoma Odita was well informed and very helpful in explaining the purpose and usefulness of the Slam Tables. She said students can "ask any question they want, then come back the next day and read the answer. It's really helpful to actually hear student opinion, especially if you're a new freshman who has no idea what to take." These comments surely would be helpful to any student seeking more information than just "that class is good," or "this professor stinks," as is the usual word of mouth fare.
Comments on these tables covered a broad range of topics. Some focused on professors' teaching styles: "Jensen's cool - be prepared to think in a new way," or "Bill Smith is completely out of touch with reality. Proceed with utmost caution."
Others offered less serious - but possibly important to some - information like, "Quinn is a great, sweet, precious old man," or "Gotta love that sexy chest pokin' through those halfway unbuttoned white dress shirts." Whatever the comment, if something like these Slam Tables could be made available at the University, thousands of students would take advantage of them.
Students need a better way to find out the best courses for them. Current course evaluations aren't published, and the Undergraduate Record doesn't cover the important aspects of a class's atmosphere. Implementing something like the University of Texas at Austin's Slam Tables would have a place here at the University. Let's take some initiative, contact our Student Council representatives, and get this thing started.
(Brandon Almond is a Cavalier Daily associate editor.)
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