CUE Deadline Extended

Harvard students received a much-needed extension this weekend when course evaluations were kept open for three extra days.

The deadline for online evaluations of courses, which was originally scheduled for Friday, Jan. 13., was extended to Monday, Jan. 16 in order to allow students more time to complete them, said Faculty of Arts and Sciences Registrar Barry S. Kane.

“One of the things we learned the first time [doing online evaluations] is there are lots of students who wait until the last minute,” Kane said.

With 84 percent of students participating and 74 percent of total evaluations completed when evaluations were finally closed Monday night, numbers were nearly identical to those from last spring, when online evaluations were used for the first time college-wide.

As of Saturday at 8 a.m., 81 percent of students had submitted evaluations and 70 percent of all evaluations were completed.

Kane said that the long winter break “really broke [the] momentum” of response rates and contributed to their sluggish start.

Administrators and faculty sent e-mail reminders to students in hopes of making course evaluation “part of the culture” at Harvard, Kane said. He also said there was a spike in response rates in the final days that evaluations were open.

To encourage greater participation in evaluations, Kane said he supports shifting to a Yale-style evaluation process, where students cannot view course grades until they have completed evaluations, either by offering feedback or choosing an opt-out feature. If Harvard were to imitate Yale’s system, evaluations would remain open until the beginning of second semester.

“The CUE guide can really only be as good as the response rate,” Kane said.

Kane expressed the satisfaction of the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) with the final response rates and with their decision to keep the tool open through the weekend.

“This demonstrated to faculty and administrators, and also to many students, that electronic evaluations can be successful,”

Kane said. “CUE evaluations are important in making sure that teaching is where it needs to be.”

As in the past, professors were allowed to decide whether or not to have their course evaluated at all.

But unlike last spring, courses were automatically open for evaluation online unless the professor requested not to include the course.

Electronic tools meant to allow faculty to analyze their CUE results, are currently being developed. A similar student tool is intended to interface with the course shopping tool at my.harvard.edu.

“[Students] really came through,” Kane said. “They do it on their own time, but they came through.”

Courses with final exams on Saturday were not included in the extension, following the college tradition that evaluations are completed before final exams.

—Staff writer Allison A. Frost can be reached at afrost@fas.harvard.edu.