UNIVERSITY students recently chose their classes for next semester. As usual, they were given a sign-up time and had to wait anxiously until SIS allowed them to enroll. Waiting is becoming increasingly nerve-wracking, however, in large part because of the ease with which students can plan their model schedules.
Useful websites that are dedicated to helping students find the best classes have made crafting the ideal schedule simple. Thanks to Physics Prof. Lou Bloomfield's website "Lou's List" students can browse quickly through data that previously would have taken much longer to view on SIS. The hours that classes are offered, the professors who teach them and the number of students enrolled all can be found on this user-friendly site.
Additionally, websites like RateMyProfessors.com and theCourseForum.com allow students to review teachers and classes. The results are posted, which gives students another resource for researching classes. Courses and professors are rated on the quality of material and level of difficulty, among other things.
These websites and the information they purvey clearly make selecting classes easier for students. Yet they can produce complications. Since the sites are easily accessible to all students, certain courses and professors draw more attention. Students take advantage of the information that the sites offer, and end up wishing to be taught by the professor who receives the best reviews. The problem, however, is that other students will do the same. In the end, one offering of a class may end up with a long wait list despite the fact that other offerings of the same subject are open.
This is evident if one browses Lou's List. Certain offerings of classes in economics and chemistry, for example, have long wait lists while others have small ones or remain open for enrollment. This could be because of scheduling issues, but also might be a result of a particular professor's reviews. Most students, for instance, probably would want to have the teacher with the more generous grade distribution, which can be discovered easily on theCourseForum.
Those who receive early class selection times are fortunate. Yet with students able to pinpoint precisely the "best" classes and teachers, those with early sign-up times can obstruct others. The University still can make some changes, however, to ensure that there is not too much variation among the material taught to students across different offerings of the same subject.
Although it cannot ensure that everyone gets his or her desired educational experience, the University might mitigate some of the divergent reviews of professors by having them teach consistently across different offerings of the same class. It is true that some reviews on theCourseForum and RateMyProfessors come from disgruntled or clearly biased students, but many evaluations contain reasonable, objective comments and can be used to distinguish one class or professor from another.
The University needs to recognize that these websites are providing its students with lucid insight into the weaknesses present in various departments and that these weaknesses should be corrected. Online reviews are not as thorough as course evaluations, but can influence strongly a student's choice of classes.
The University neither has the power to make each of its professors teach in the same style nor the ability to guarantee that each professor is of equally high quality. A large step toward controlling variation among different offerings of the same class, though, is ensuring that one class is not learning material that is vastly different from other classes of the same level.
This could be accomplished through the administering of uniform examinations across all class offerings - something that currently is not done in every department. In this way, all students taking a class would be exposed to the same material, making it so that they would learn the same information whether their class was taught by a respected professor or by a graduate teaching assistant. It would not hinder professors from teaching in their own styles, but rather would provide structure to help guarantee that one student's experience in a class does not deviate too significantly from another's experience in a different offering of the same class since a majority of the material would be learned by all.
Uniform exams across all classes of the same level also would help to produce a fairer grade distribution in each class. The distribution still would be determined by student performance in individual classes, of course, but it would not indicate that one class is necessarily harder than another.
Some class offerings of the same level at the University are bound to be more difficult than others. Having similar midterms or final examinations across offerings, however, would assist in evening out the difficulties.
Alex Yahanda is a Viewpoint writer for The Cavalier Daily.
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