Finding the Good Courses

Throughout reading period, numerous e-mails and multimedia messages from campus personalities such as Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 and Director of Athletics Robert L. Scalise have clogged undergraduates’ inboxes, each in its own way begging students to fill out their online CUE evaluations. And while the Committee on Undergraduate Education’s (CUE) survey is far from perfect, students should heed the unending flow of admonitions. The CUE survey may need some tweaking, but it largely continues to be useful in helping students choose their courses. Students’ participation, however, constitutes only half of a successful evaluation process, and if the CUE Guide is to be as effective as possible, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) must require professors to have their courses evaluated and have the results published in the Guide.

At the May 2 Faculty meeting, Gross proposed that CUE evaluations be required for all courses with at least five students. The measure met fierce resistance from many faculty members including Professor of German Peter J. Burgard and Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, the latter claiming that “course evaluations introduce the rule of the less wise over the more wise, of students over professors.” (The Faculty narrowly voted to postpone a vote on Gross’ proposal.)

While it is inherently difficult for students to evaluate course content itself (how is one supposed to “evaluate” a particular era of history?), students are particularly suited to comment on matters such as a professor’s presentation and course organization—and evaluations of this sort comprise a significant portion of the survey. In turn, the aggregate data of all courses should be available when students weigh courses from the whole of Courses of Instruction. As long as undergraduates are given the freedom to choose their own courses, there is no reason to restrict the amount of information that they can provide each other about these courses. The CUE Guide is only one source of information among many, but limiting the CUE in any way only limits its ultimate utility.

Given that the CUE Guide is one of the primary course selection resources, the CUE survey should be modified to help it better convey the information that students need and want. As we have suggested in the past, the CUE survey ought to be shortened, and the current grading scale of one to five should be expanded to a seven-point system. Currently, students only rarely rate professors or teaching fellows below “3,” and expanding the scale would allow student to get a better sense of the actual quality of their professors. Moreover, the survey needs to be rewritten to help identify particular strengths and weakness, as too many sample comments in the CUE are either too generic or irrelevant to be of any real use. The survey should also include information on the cost of coursepacks, allowing students to protest unnecessarily expensive course materials.

There is one feature of the CUE, however, that should not be changed. Some students have complained that they do not have time to complete CUE evaluations during the stressful time of reading and examinations periods, and so they should be able to evaluate courses until the end of the school year. Perhaps moved by this complaint, the administration has extended the deadline for each course’s CUE evaluation to 8 a.m. the morning of the course final exam. This is a reasonable decision, as it allows students as much time as possible to complete their evaluations while still requiring their completion before the final exam. Students who encounter either an inordinately difficult or easy final may be swayed in their evaluation of the course, and thus, in the interest of objectivity, a course must be evaluated before its final exam. If students’ response rates are low, the solution is not to push the deadline into June when students have fled campus; rather, the College could consider providing incentives such as gift certificates and free iPods.

The CUE Guide continues to be an important resource for course selection, but in order for it to be useful as possible, the CUE survey needs to convey as much information as possible about all courses, not just those whose professors consent. And students need to participat, lest the entire survey be rendered useless. These changes will help the CUE to better serve its purpose, which, in the words of Gross in his recorded message to the College community, “is to let students know where the good courses is. Are.” And since we all want to know where the good courses is—undergraduates of Harvard, please fill out your CUE.