Course Evaluations To Be Tailor-Made

Administrators at yesterday’s Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) meeting revealed a new CUE Guide system that will be launched this winter.

The new online CUE Guide forms will allow professors to add specific questions tailored to their classes and will unify the currently separate systems used by undergraduates and graduate students.

According to a presentation given at the meeting by Director of the Office of Research and Analysis Karen R. Menard and the Registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Barry S. Kane, supplemental questions are expected to be widely used for foreign language courses, expository writing courses, and classes with laboratory components.

Kane also said that the current practice of using a separate CUE guide system for students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will end this semester.

“Up until this fall, the Graduate School and Harvard College has had their own electronic course evaluation systems,” Kane said. “The faculty often complained about the awkwardness of two systems essentially doing the same thing.”

He added, however, that professors would have the option of adding extra questions that would only be asked of the graduate students evaluating their classes.

In addition to new questions, students can expect to see a cleaner layout on CUE guide forms this semester and new features, Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 said at the meeting.

“This is the first time that a form has been designed for on line use. The committee worked over a year in the formulation of the questions and the layout,” Gross wrote in an e-mail last night.

For example, students will be able to save evaluations they are working on and finish them later, something that is not currently possible.

“Students don’t have to finish it in one sitting,” Gross said.

The CUE said that it hopes the new system will increase student participation in course evaluations.

“Now we have to get people to use it.” Gross said of online evaluations. “Last semester 75 percent of the students participated.” In Spring 2005, the participation rate reached 83 percent.

Incentives for increasing participation were discussed, including delaying access to online grades for students who have not filled out their course evaluations.

—Staff writer Peter R. Raymond can be reached at praymond@fas.harvard.edu.