For students who are still waffling between a couple of courses, chances are they won’t be getting much help from course evaluations. Student government officials are working to change that.
Last fall, after lobbying by Engineering Student Government, the Pratt School of Engineering introduced machine-readable course evaluation forms. For the first time, the new system will allow data from engineering courses to appear on ACES Web, with professors’ permission.
“This is something that ESG has had on the agenda for years and years and years,” said Ian Shakil, Pratt’s junior class president.
Engineering undergraduates should be able to view some evaluations in time for registration for Fall 2005, said Tod Laursen, Pratt’s senior associate dean for education.
“Something needed to be done to make this information more accessible,” Laursen said.
Shakil said he was pleased to see results from his many meetings with deans, but he added that ESG’s work is not yet finished. Under the opt-in policy that goes into effect this semester, students can only see the evaluations of professors who actively choose to make this data available.
“We want more than opt-in. We want opt-out,” Shakil said.
In Trinity, which introduced an opt-in system a few years ago, about 87 percent of professors do not respond to the e-mail they receive each semester that asks if they would like their evaluations to appear online. As a result, just 9 percent of professors’ evaluations are on ACES.
Efforts to increase that number hit a snag Dec. 9 when the Arts and Sciences Council voted against shifting to an opt-out policy, under which the evaluations of professors who do not respond would have appeared on ACES automatically. Members of Duke Student Government’s Academic Affairs Committee were disappointed in the faculty response.
Senior Chase Johnson, DSG’s vice president of academic affairs, questioned the fairness of withholding information concerning class quality from students who pay high tuition fees to enroll in their courses. “What other situation could you name when you’re spending $40,000 to do something, and you don’t know about the person who’s doing it?” Johnson asked.
Student government members first approached George McLendon, dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College, with their concerns. Potential solutions they aired included promoting the independent, unofficial website ratemyprofessors.com.
Although Johnson said he was pleased with McLendon’s openness to his suggestions, Academic Affairs Committee members were concerned that Thompson seemed to have depicted their proposals as somewhat adversarial. Still, they were happy that the administrators had brought the issue to the attention of the faculty.
“We got it on the table, at least for a while,” said junior Chris Chin, a senator on the committee. As a result of the reconsideration, the Arts and Sciences Council accepted a resolution to improve the system by which professors allow evaluations to appear on ACES, despite faculty’s rejection of an opt-out policy.
Thompson, who championed the measures in the council, said he was frustrated that faculty had voted down the policy change. He explained that students would have benefitted from greater access to evaluations and expressed his sympathy for their concerns.
“I’ve really appreciated their patience and their working with me,” Thompson said of DSG. “I know it’s got to be as frustrating to them as it is to me.”
Student government members consider professors’ opposition to putting evaluations on ACES ill-founded.
“[Students] even rate the hard teachers fairly. They really do,” Shakil said.
Both DSG and ESG members are eager to see whether the number of evaluations online will increase without further changes in policy.
“If we see very good results, then obviously there’s no need to fight,” Chin said. He was optimistic that more education of faculty members would increase the amount of information online.
Johnson echoed Chin’s desire to increase interaction with faculty about the issue. “We do need to communicate to the faculty more about this,” he said.
Shakil suggested that if too few professors let students see their evaluations, ESG would be prepared to either create its own website for rating professors or point students to an independent evaluations database.
“We are more than willing, if they don’t budge,” Shakil said. “It’s our money. It’s our education.”
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