CUE On the Line

Paper, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Northern Spotted Owl, will soon become history. Harvard is following suit. In a dramatic overhaul of the existing system, the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) has shifted away from traditional paper-and-pencil evaluations to entirely online forms, to be joined in 2006 by an exclusively online CUE Guide. But while the online system instituted this semester holds many potential advantages, it could also exacerbate problems with participation and statistical accuracy. Such issues should be addressed now before they have far-ranging effects.

Online CUE evaluations promise significant logistical improvements to the system. An electronic system will save trees and tabulation time. The new system will also be far more flexible and open to reform. Already, this flexibility is being exploited to rework the format of the evaluations, allowing students to rate classes overall first before they evaluate secondary areas like difficulty and homework. We hope that increased flexibility will also lead to at least one other format change. Currently, the scale used to judge professors and Teaching Fellows ranges from 1-5, a far too limited span considering that students rarely give professors ones or twos. An extended scale from 1-7 would better enable students to distinguish between excellent and mediocre instructors. Free from the inertia of printing costs and their associated logistics, we expect that CUE evaluations will improve at an accelerated rate.

The effect of bringing CUE evaluations into the information age is not so cut-and-dried vis-à-vis student participation, however. Critics of the move have pointed out that putting surveys online almost always reduces sample sizes. The CUE is right to take this as a challenge to make certain that all students—even those mired in academic apathy—are inspired to participate in the surveys.

In the past, time was allotted for students to fill out evaluation forms in class. This system rarely captured the views of less-motivated students with poor attendance, cutting out a significant and important minority among respondents. Online CUE evaluations have the potential to correct for this problem by allowing everyone access to the forms, not just a self-selected group of lecture-goers who are engaged in the class. But, lacking the immediacy of actually being filled out in class, they also have the potential to decrease participation overall.

Thus far, between e-mail reminders and on-campus advertising, we think that the 75 percent participation level mandated by Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 will be reached. An added incentive system would ensure the CUE’s success in this area. It would be too drastic to make evaluations mandatory (say, by withholding grades until evaluations have been turned in). So, instead of a “big stick” incentive, we suggest a carrot alternative. For example, completion of CUE evaluations could be accompanied by online giveaways. The committee could even tap into the competitive nature of Harvard students and sponsor a contest which would award the House with the highest percentage of CUE evaluation participants.

Online CUE evaluations are wonderful improvements to campus discourse. We hope Gross and the CUE take the necessary measures to ensure its success, and also that students take the matter seriously and invest the time to contribute their commentaries. CUE guides and the evaluations that produce them are immensely valuable to students and faculty alike. Any advance with the potential to make them more representative and more accurate should be heartily welcomed.