A Little Knowledge

Each and every reading period, Lamont Library’s brightly lit, over-heated insides echo with our quiet cursing of all those instructors who had the gall to assign thousands of pages of material, without even pretending to hold us accountable during the term. In short, it’s the perfect time to ask us to fill out course evaluations.

Expect, in the coming days, a deluge of unsolicited e-mails from prominent campus figures, giving you all sorts of reasons to fill our your Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) guides. Don’t get mad at them; they probably don’t know that they’ve sent them to you.

It wasn’t always this way. Time was that we’d get to skip out on almost an entire section’s worth of material to fill out paper evaluations in class. When the College administration finally put the CUE online in the spring of 2005, however, we traded in a free period for an impressive volume of spam. It’s all well intentioned, of course, but the effort nonetheless comes up short. Though recent CUE reform efforts have focused on tweaking the content of the online forms and on mandating the participation of all teaching fellows, the evaluation process can be much more useful to undergraduates and instructors alike with a few basic changes.

Most importantly, participation in the CUE guide needs to be complete if the results are to be most meaningful. From the faculty side, that means requiring professors to submit themselves to evaluation. As far as student participation is concerned, a change in incentives should produce a higher rate of involvement. Specifically, the reward for filling out CUE evaluations should not be relief from saccharine e-mail reminders, or even extra funding for one’s House or Yard, but rather access to CUE results the following year. It’s a simple quid pro quo: spend the twenty minutes required to complete your CUE evaluations each semester, and you’ll get to use the CUE guide. Students who decline to participate will simply see the CUE feature disappear from the online course shopping tool when they log in to my.harvard.edu.

There are two obvious problems with this model for improving participation. The first is a free rider problem; what’s to prevent me, a delinquent student, from skipping out on my CUE evaluations, only to use my roommates’ access later? One hopes, however, that there will be enough of a benefit in avoiding the inconvenience of using a roommate’s computer every time one wants to see the CUE survey to induce students to fill out the online forms.

The second issue is that this model would require eliminating the printed version of the CUE guide, presently distributed to every suite at the beginning of the year. (Loss of CUE privileges becomes a fairly meaningless deterrent if every student gets a paper copy in their room, no matter what.) This will, admittedly, inconvenience any student who prefers the printed guide over the online equivalent. We should be prepared to leave those students’ preferences unsatisfied, however; with the online version of the CUE now tied in so thoroughly to the online course catalogue, the paper version’s days should probably be numbered anyway.

Beyond trying to increase participation in the CUE, the results of the evaluations should be more faithfully presented to give undergraduates a better sense of the reviews their would-be teachers received. There are two reasons for this. First, when we, as undergraduates, see our grades inflated by our instructors, we are often happy to return the favor. On those occasions, the scores (4.1 out of 5) and comments (“Boring.” “Average.” “Totally uninspiring.”) that teachers receive are out of sync, and so students should have access to the entirety of that information, to draw their own conclusions about the validity of the reviews.

Furthermore, the incentive for instructors to maintain a very high standard of teaching will be much stronger when they know that their students’ comments will be moderated only for the grossest forms of indiscretion, rather than edited and condensed into a single sentence with a bunch of adjectives in quotation marks. When teachers are unexceptional, students’ complaints should get a full, public hearing. To simplify them is to make them meaningless.

But the way that the online CUE evaluations process can best be harnessed to improve immediately teaching quality at Harvard has nothing at all to do with the surveys themselves. If every undergraduate is required to complete the evaluations, it should also require them to complete a very basic form of pre-registration for the courses that they intend to take the following semester. This would by no means be a binding declaration, but rather a formal expression of interest in the group of courses that one is contemplating for the next term, however many courses that may be.

The purpose that this would serve is to better inform professors’ hiring decisions when it comes to recruiting top TFs for their courses. Often, the shoddiest TFs are those that are hired at the last minute, when course enrolment exceeds what professors had anticipated. Pre-registration would diminish the need for faculty members to guess the number of students they’ll attract and the number of TFs they’ll require, and would lead to significant improvements in the quality of the instructors that wind up teaching undergraduate sections. By making the process formal, but not binding, we stand to benefit from better-planned teaching staffs while avoiding the harms of over-planned academic programs.

Over the next two weeks, dubious e-mails claiming to be from notable administrators and faculty will plead with us to take time away from Facebook.com to fill out our CUE evaluations. With luck, most of us will oblige. But when it comes to getting the most out of the feedback we submit each semester, the CUE has ample room for improvement.



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears regularly.