THE COURSE Offering Directory can make just about any course at the University look good. With a general-sounding title and a two-sentence description at best, the most boring and frustrating classes can be impossible to distinguish from the truly life-changing educational experiences. In reality, the only piece of information in the COD that determines the worth of a course is the name under the "Instructor" heading, and the University has kept its feedback on those individuals secret for years. Fortunately, this may not be the case forever. By adopting Student Council's plan for providing student access to a portion of the responses to end-of-semester course evaluations, the administration could greatly improve the quality of students' academic experiences.
On March 30, Student Council approved a resolution calling for a future system to release some course evaluation results to students. The public data would come exclusively from a set of five questions Council requested to be included in evaluations University-wide. According to College Rep. Tanay Amin, the resolution's co-sponsor, responsibility for implementing the program rests on the shoulders of the Office of the Provost, which currently heads a committee on course evaluations. Though Council's resolution is merely a suggestion for the committee to consider, it boasts a number of benefits that would be unfair to ignore.
Students at the University have a legitimate interest in previewing the quality of courses before they take them, especially before declaring a major. A student's choice of major is often influenced by taking a few introductory classes in various departments, and it is important for major-seekers to find classes that can provide a useful picture of what majoring in their subject would look like. For courses to do this, they must have professors who can successfully communicate the nature of the subject being studied and make themselves available for out-of-class questions about their chosen field. Council's proposed questions would measure both of these attributes.
Another recommended question addresses the issue of whether courses require the appropriate amount of work for their indicated level of difficulty. It would be easy to see data on this topic as a means for students to select classes with a light course load over those that could truly benefit them, but this is not the case. Individual major programs already require students to take courses at intermediate and advanced levels. The only real effect of public availability of this information would be to aid the many students heavily involved in research projects and extracurricular activities to better budget their time for the coming semester.
Incoming first years have a unique need for an official means of researching student opinion on specific courses. Upperclassmen are generally afforded the ability to solicit recommendations for taking classes from fellow students, whereas new first years are less likely to have points of contact within the University community. The system of randomly pairing up first years with academic advisors at orientation is an inadequate substitute, as advisors are prone to be uninformed about the details of the body of courses outside of their departments.
Unofficial sources of public student feedback are largely useless for aiding in course selection, thanks to their voluntary nature. Third-party course evaluation Web sites, like RateMyProfessors.com, have a limited amount of useful data because they lack significant levels of participation. It's true that many students don't fill out their University-sponsored evaluations, but they are more apt to complete those than they are to make the effort to seek out feedback opportunities on their own.
The depth of information provided on these sites is also a bit wanting, whereas Student Council's questions are set up to provide quantitative information about a course's specific strengths and weaknesses. Council's question about professors' willingness to speak to students outside of class is more specific than a simple "helpfulness" index, and separate questions about communicating subject matter and course goals are superior to a single "clarity" rating. While RateMyProfessor.com may be valued for its ability to identify which politics professors are "hot," the Council plan would provide a more complete description of student sentiment toward certain classes.
A month ago, I wrote a column criticizing Student Council for sometimes neglecting its duty to address genuine student concerns. Thankfully, Council's efforts to make course evaluations tangibly useful to students demonstrate that this is not always the case. It is now up to the Office of the Provost to make sure these efforts are not in vain.
Chris Kiser's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ckiser@cavalierdaily.com.
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