ANY DAY now, the new Course Offering Directory will become available with selected data from online course evaluations to help students pick which classes and professors they would most like to take. After being officially commended for completing class evaluations by a Student Council resolution, we students stand ready to reap the rewards of our dutiful bubble-clicking from last fall.
However, it's worth taking a step back to consider the extent to which the new information will actually improve our academic experience at the University.
For a preview, I logged onto RateMyProfessor.com, which has provided students with a forum where they can sound off about professors since long before the days of online evaluations. It's illuminating to look at the criteria students use to judge the quality of their professors. The most venerated professors receive comments like "interesting," "nice," "funny" and "cute." One comment commends a professor for being a"very funny, sarcastic lecturer," adding, "lots of examples and pop culture. Good use of PowerPoint."
Such superficiality is highlighted by the denouncements of professors given low ratings, almost all of which contain the word "boring," such as one student's typical comment, prefaced by "What a boring lady!"
Recently, some faculty have expressed reservations about the new system.Anthropology Chair Ellen Contini-Morava expressed in an interview a number of concerns shared by her department, not the least of which was the dual purpose the evaluations are meant to serve. In essence, students are being asked to evaluate a professor in way that will affect his or her employment, while at the same time "giving advice to friends about what classes might be fun to take," as Contini-Morava put it.
In 1997, University English Prof. Mark Edmundson wrote an essay in Harper's magazine where he claimed that the superficiality of class evaluations reflected the mentality of students who expect that the chief purpose of their college education is to entertain them. Edmonson says it's a sign that "university culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment."
The consumer market in higher education has historically been a boon to America's university system, making it the best in the world. But markets only function properly when participants are acting in their self-interest, and recently many students seem to evaluate their education in a way that ignores their long term best interests: by how fun and interesting it is. Thus, by solidifying the expectation of entertainment on the Course Offering Directory, we run the risk of encouraging students to pick courses off a buffet like a six-year-old set loose in the Golden Corral -- by how good they taste.
The problem here is that besides damaging the student's long-term eduation, we change the basis for judging excellence in higher education by placing style over substance. The problem is not merely that that enrollment will shrink for good professors who have an unpopular style, but also that it will grow for bad professors with a popular style. Assuming that students will gravitate to classes with the most positive evaluations, imagine a teacher who's amiable, funny, and who dispenses interesting anecdotes and good grades. The teacher rakes in the positive recommendations, and the number of students in his lecture hall correspondingly balloons. Lost in the hype surrounding the professor and his class is the fact that it provides only a shallow or skewed background in the subject at hand or inadequately develops students' critical reading or thinking skills.
By giving precedence to evaluations that emphasize style over substance, we risk the glorification of mediocrity. By rewarding professors for style, we create pressure for other faculty to submit to the trends and threaten the integrity of the University as a whole.
For a start, other departments should stop using the dual-purpose online evaluations for faculty evaluation impacting employment, which would entail the uncoupling of online evaluations from academic incentives or punishments tied to their completion, such as extra credit.
Then, if Council chooses to launch a separate online forum for the specific purpose of advice, they could do so. But if we decide that such evaluations are helpful to the class-picking process, I hope that each one is served with a grain of salt.
Herb Ladley is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at hladley@cavalierdaily.com.
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