AS FINALS and papers start to close in on the student body, students tend to reciprocate by making work their sole focus. Probably one of the last things on the mind of University students are the course evaluations sent out by the University. Though these online forms do not take long to fill out, and may provide some helpful information to professors and the departments to which they go, they are also deeply flawed. Most particularly, the students who must fill them out glean no benefit from them. The University ought to make the results of the evaluation more useful to students; that would encourage students to participate at a higher rate, benefiting everyone.
The University can do several things to make course evaluation forms more helpful for students without detracting from their usefulness to professors. Currently, they are of next to no use for students, especially when signing up for classes. Thus, unless one has exceptionally high praise for a class or an especially virulent hatred of it, one has little incentive to take even the five minutes it takes to evaluate a course. The reason they are of little use comes from the nature of the questions asked on the evaluations and the way it is presented when linked from the Course Offering Directory online.
Less helpful than the information on the amount of time spent on classes are the answers to the other questions answered by students in the previous class. The set-up is difficult to peruse quickly, given the questions are numbered, and the questions themselves only positioned in the upper left corner. This makes the page more difficult to read and hinders the fast answers most students crave when seeking information on classes. Also, the scale of ranking things from one to five makes small differences harder to detect. The difference between a mean rating of 4.23 and 4.39 gives little clue as to the real effectiveness of a professor. A scale ranging from one to ten might more effectively provide information about a class and professor.
The real problem, however, is that the course evaluations do not address the real concerns of students. Most students want to know how much work a class is, how entertaining the professor may or may not be, and whether or not the class is generally worthwhile. The University's course evaluations, while they have sections for general comments, do not have a place where students can share their opinions with other students. Students have to turn to other sources for information about prospective professors, such as ratemyprofessors.com, where they can actually find out information about the aspects of a course they really want to know.
According to Tim Sigmon, Director of Advanced Technology for ITC, this course selection guide has been the most controversial part of the course evaluation process. According to Sigmon, some faculty members do not want students to see their results and have, therefore, sought to keep this feature out of the COD entirely. Part of the compromise between Student Council and the faculty on this issue is that for results to show up at all, 65 percent of students must fill out a course evaluation. This means that for classes that do not inspire students to fill out an evaluation, no information will be passed on. This denies students information, and while a quota ought to exist to make evaluations more balanced, 65 percent seems too high. A fifty percent response rate would be more than adequate to warrant publication.
The University ought to add a question to course evaluation meant for student consumption, and then they ought to publish student answers, or at least a sampling of them. Then, students could learn about the difficulty of a class, or the abilities of a professor instead of having to merely guess by interpreting a set of numbers.Though some such forums exist, such as the Echols Peer Advising Program, including such a question into the COD course selection guide would allow better access to information.
By integrating such a forum into the course evaluation process, the University would increase the incentive for students to fill out the course evaluations. Students ought to fill these out anyway, as they provide valuable information on a class for the instructor. This is especially valuable for TAs, who have the opportunity and motive to improve their teaching habits. The input of students can have a valuable impact on academic life at the University. They just need the incentive to impart it.
Robby Colby's column appears Thursday in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at rjain@cavalierdaily.com.
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