Students now have a new space to air opinions about professors and classes.
Arts and Sciences is providing server space to a new course evaluations website. The website was developed by students of Owen Astrachan, professor of the practice of computer science.
The site is evals.aas.duke.edu.
Visitors to the site-which is live as of Thursday night-can use a form to post numerical scores and comments about class experiences. They can also view others' ratings, sorted by course or professor. A NetID log-in controls access to the site.
"For now, I think this is a really good solution," said sophomore Elliott Wolf, president-elect of Duke Student Government, a student in Astrachan's class and a former Chronicle columnist. "I am personally endorsing this, even though I came out for a totally independent site."
Wolf previously had created his own course evaluations site.
DSG served as a liaison between students working on the project and the administrators-Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College, and George McLendon, dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences-who authorized giving them the necessary resources.
Although the site is on a server owned by the University, students involved in the project said safeguards are in place to prevent the possibility of a shutdown by administrators.
"I'm not concerned. We've got assurances from the deans that the data will be ours," said junior Joe Fore, vice president of academic affairs for DSG.
Fore noted that one advantage of using a University server is being able to use NetIDs.
Limiting access to University students is a measure that will both increase the accuracy of ratings and assuage faculty fears, Wolf explained.
"We don't want someone really not liking a course and posting 10 really negative comments," Wolf said.
Benjamin Pollack, a senior and one of the three students who programmed the site, emphasized that evaluations would still be anonymous and untraceable.
"The site is designed to protect student anonymity," Pollack said. "When they write an evaluation, they have the option to put their name by it or not."
Undergraduates will continue to maintain and develop the site, Pollack explained. He said planned improvements include allowing users to sort professors by rating.
"Students registering for classes can see who is competent and who is not," Pollack said. "I hope it will be very heavily used."
Wolf said he plans to help publicize the site during his tenure as DSG president.
"I'll do whatever I can to make sure people use it," Wolf said. "New features are nice, but the main thing is, do you have 1000 evaluations, or do you have 20 evaluations?"
Wenjia Zhang contributed to this story.
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