As the Duke Student Government Vice President for Academic Affairs, Joe Fore is supposed to fight for my interests. The students elected him to serve as our chief advocate in academic matters, and he has failed in that very important role.
The single most important issue facing the Academic Affairs Committee is course evaluations. So far, AAC's efforts have consisted almost exclusively of lobbying the Arts & Sciences Council to adopt an "opt-out" policy for course evaluations on ACES-a policy by which professors would have to remove their evaluation data from ACES instead of adding it.
So far, pretty much all of those efforts have proved fruitless. Now DSG is reduced to politely asking faculty members to post their evaluation data on ACES-something that they have no real motivation to do. Understandably, faculty members do not want to have an entire semester's worth of teaching reduced to a few numerical averages and have acted accordingly.
As someone who doesn't particularly like to have an entire semester's worth of work reduced to a single grade, I can appreciate their position. In voting down the opt-out resolution, the A&S Council voted in the interests of its constituents.
DSG must do the same for its constituents and stop simultaneously pandering to the students, faculty and administration. DSG is the student lobby, but it has forgotten that. The one and only one question DSG should ever consider is what do the students want?
So I ask, with respect to course evaluations, what do the students want?
What we want-and what we need-cannot be gained through an opt-out policy or even a significant increase in the opt-in rate on ACES.
ACES contains no qualitative comments, and as long as any professor does not allow his evaluations to be shown, the system is effectively censored. I would very much like to see all of the data that we provide (both quantitative and qualitative) posted on ACES, but that's simply not going to happen.
Under the control of the A&S Council, ACES has no hope of ever offering viable course reviews, and DSG's efforts were futile from the beginning.
Something else is needed, and other systems have been successful at Duke and other universities. The best example is the now-defunct Duke Undergraduates Evaluate Teaching system, a course evaluations website begun as an experiment by a statistics professor in 1998.
Given the limitations of ACES and the success of DUET (it was good until the faculty got upset and DSG capitulated), the establishment of another independent system that provides both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of professors is what is necessary. Last year, Fore toyed with that idea and told The Chronicle it should be ready by registration this semester. But true to DSG form, no details were given. By the way, registration ended Wednesday.
Well, enough is enough.
Victor Strandberg, professor of English, noted, "Students are certain to have their own system of which we will have no say whatsoever if we try to stonewall them." Having reviewed the A&S Council's long history of resistance to course evaluations, it's safe to say that I feel sufficiently stonewalled.
And Strandberg's statement has proved prophetic.
As of Tuesday morning, I have been running a course evaluations website from the computer in my room in Kilgo Quad. It cost me absolutely no money and was conceived and programmed in a single weekend. The site is functional, and more than 100 reviews have already been posted. Students can provide both qualitative and quantitative feedback and browse by professor, course and department-all on a system where no information is hidden. It is independent of DSG and the administration.
My very wise friend Rob Goodman noted last year in Chronicle column that "DSG ought to be making nice things happen, not declaring that nice things are nice." AAC has resisted tangible action and has been declaring that nice things are nice for too long.
Now someone else is forced to try and make them happen: http://evals.dorm.duke.edu/
Elliott Wolf is a Trinity sophomore. His column normally runs every other Tuesday.
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