On a Scale of 1-5

As I was contemplating what to write for my final column, thinking back over the last four years of news covered by The Crimson, a gift topic fell into my lap in the form of the Senior Survey. In exchange for commencement tickets (a wisely-chosen barter on the part of the College), all seniors must fill out an eight-part multiple choice and free-response survey on aspects of life at Harvard. In an e-mail sent to the Class of 2000, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 directed us to a website for easy responding and pointed out that the survey "results will be very valuable to [the College] as we work to understand your academic and extracurricular experience, your ambitions, and which aspects of Harvard should be reinforced and which need change."

The survey is clearly a very valuable way for the College to learn what we think about our four years here (witness the incredibly informative--and in some cases, telling--concentration advising statistics released last year), and also a personally useful way for seniors to start reviewing our own Harvard experience. The 30-minute questionnaire touches on topics ranging from House life to academics and extracurriculars and allows room for decently long free-response answers if one chooses to give them.

But after filling out the form online, I couldn't help but feel that there were questions that had gone unasked, both general ones which would apply to any senior class at Harvard, and questions about these particular four years, from 1996 to 2000, which have shaped this senior class. For reasons of statistical continuity, the survey questions can't change all that much from year to year, and the length of the survey can't get too unwieldy, but if I had been able to add questions for this and future years, here's some of what I would have asked:

For all senior classes, focusing specifically on the House Experience and Academic Program sections:

House Experience is the most extensive Harvard-related section, coming in at nine questions and one free response. Compare that to the four-question Extracurricular Activities section (which has no free response), which for many of us might have had greater influence on our Harvard experiences than our House life, however memorable the latter might be.

It is crucial to ask students how helpful and available their masters, senior tutors, tutors and Senior Common Room members were to them, but it is also important to ask us where we spent the bulk of our time, and what role we think the Houses play in student life now, as opposed to 40 years ago, and in comparison to extracurricular activities. Additionally, there are no specific references to randomization on the survey, so a question asking "on a scale of 1-5, to what degree has randomization influenced your House experience?" might be in order.

In the second section, the Academic Program (which has provided us in the past with the statistics on academic advising), there are only two multiple choice questions about the Core program: "How would you rate the quality of your instruction in core classes" (scale of 1-5) and "How important would it be to have more faculty teach Core courses" (scale of 1-5). Though there is room in the free response questions which follow to discuss our most positive and most disappointing academic experiences at the College, it is more likely that those answers will focus on a specific course and won't address the Core as a whole, a topic which warrants more extensive and specific questioning.

In the style of the CUE guide, the survey might profitably ask what percent of our Core classes we attended, how many of our Core TF's were trained in the specific subject of the course, how many Core requirements we think we could have more productively filled with department classes and how effective the Core has been in our educational experience.

Similarly, though the survey asks how important (scale of 1-5) it would be for Harvard to expand the Faculty in a number of specific areas, including more minority faculty and more women faculty, it might also be useful to ask students how many minority faculty and how many women faculty (tenured and non-tenured) have taught us in the last four years, a better reflection of the distance still to go to have true diversity on the Faculty.

For the Class of 2000, questions on issues and events which have helped shape our College experience:

On a scale of 1-5, how closely did you follow the Radcliffe merger? On a scale of 1-5, how involved were you with Radcliffe before it became an allied institute? How active are you now with issues affecting women at Harvard College? Did you participate in a protest in the last four years?

On a scale of 1-5, how important is it to you that Harvard a) give its workers a living wage? b) have no involvement with sweatshop labor? c) build a student center? d) build a women's center? How important is it that University Health Services give refunds to students opposed to abortion? On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate the financial aid program at Harvard? If you gave to the senior gift, did you direct your donation to the financial aid program?

Any of these issues could be addressed by individual seniors in a free response answer, I realize, but the College would get a more widespread, not to mention statistically significant, response if it were to include questions like the ones above in multiple-choice format. I suggest these questions not necessarily with the expectation of certain answers but because the questions probe aspects of life at the College which the survey, useful and thoughtful though it already is, does not address directly.

The senior survey is a requirement but also an opportunity, the last chance we have to make a meaningful contribution as students of this College. We should share as much of our experience as possible in the hope of truly reinforcing all that is wonderful here and articulating all that could be improved.

Susannah B. Tobin '00 is a classics concentrator in Lowell House. This is her final column.