When you click on the link, you're confronted with 30-plus different evaluation categories and lots and lots of numbers. Soon enough, you come to realize that almost no useful information can be garnered from this data unless you run a linear regression analysis on it.
Welcome to Duke's newest course evaluations. Course evaluation methods have gone through several reincarnations while I've been at Duke; unfortunately, they've regressed from remotely useful to almost totally useless.
What does a 3.37 enthusiasm rating tell me about whether I will enjoy a certain professor's course? Virtually nothing.
The key fact here is that each of the three groups involved in the process of putting together the latest course evaluations have rather different goals. Most professors are simply interested in improving their courses--they want to know which readings are more useful than others and whether the assignments are too demanding. The administration wants to know how much learning actually takes place in the classroom and how effective a professor is at transferring knowledge to the students. If the student feedback is particularly telling, the evaluations could even be factored into whether the professor gets tenure or not. As for the students, most undergrads want to know whether the professor will bore them to death and how hard it will be to get an A in the class.
All the professors I've ever had were very open about receiving criticism concerning the structure and the content of their course. As far as the administration is concerned, I'm guessing the new quantitative system could provide a fairly accurate snapshot of whether the professor was an atrocious instructor. And the students?
We seem to have gotten the short end of the stick again. Where is the grade distribution data for each previously offered course, complete with the mean grade and variance? I'm sure most students would love to know this information. Where are the subjective descriptions of the professor's personality--is this someone who will cook dinner for the entire class one evening and greet you on the quad years later or is this someone who will routinely cancel office hours and forget your name by the semester's end?
I've had over two dozen different professors in my Duke career so far, and I've seen them run the gamut from horrible to excellent. Some instructors speak in an unintelligible stutter. Some go off on tangents and babble for an hour about a semi-interesting yet unrelated topic--and then proceed to quiz you on the material the lecture should have covered. Some even work out an example problem on the board only to realize 15 minutes later that they demonstrated the wrong procedure. I've even had courses where I could have learned more about the subject from a random Internet search than by going to class.
On the other hand, I've also had professors who completely halted all their research that semester and fully dedicated themselves to being able to deliver the lectures extemporaneously and answer questions on the spot. I've had professors who gladly spent hours each week answering follow-up emails on topics raised during class discussions. One professor even happily proofread a draft of a term paper I was writing for another class.
So where is my opportunity to share all these experiences with other students in a public format?
Yet the most interesting thing here is that many students seem to be waiting for the University administration to fix this inadequacy. But Duke University has no obligation to provide its students with a method of evaluating professors, and this is a key point that most Duke Student Government officials continue to miss.
After all, why should it? As students, we're not paying for an education here; we're paying for an opportunity to get an education. The undergraduate bulletin makes very few promises--we're assured a minimum of roughly 35 hours of instruction per semester. It's also promised to us that at the time listed on our schedules, our professors will teach on the subject matter described in the bulletin. And that's about it. At the end of it all, we receive a diploma, but even that framed piece of paper is not a certificate of a world-class education. If anything, it's hardly more than proof that we spent four years of our life as seeds in some of the most intellectually fertile soil in the world.
And that's why the administration isn't going to fight this one for us--it's not their cause. Judging by the relative ease with which EZDuke.com put up a useful version of course evaluations back in the spring, I expected our elected representatives in DSG to do their job and use their sizable budget to create an even better system.
But one quick look at what's currently online lets me know that this is definitely not the case--the information that's on there now is all but useless from an undergraduate perspective.
Marko Djuranovic is a Trinity senior and former health & science editor of The Chronicle.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.