Goodbye CUE, Hello Q

The full-court press to get students to fill out course evaluations has started early this year. But instead of e-mails from celebrity students and faculty, the powers-that-be have decided a bit of re-branding is in order. Last week, the Office of the Registrar flooded the University mail system with cards announcing a new and improved CUE Guide, now known as “The Q.”

But the new, vaguely James Bond-ish name for Harvard’s course evaluation guide heralds even bigger changes. According to the Registrar’s cards, the new Q will allow Graduate School of Arts and Sciences courses to be evaluated, and professors will be able to add their own customized questions to the evaluation form to get more specific feedback. Administrators in charge of the Q did not respond to requests for comment.

While these changes are improvements, however small, the present reinvention of the course evaluation system is a missed opportunity to make more meaningful alterations to the culture of feedback and pedagogical improvement at Harvard. Specifically, the reforms fail to address incomplete participation by both students and faculty, which remain the CUE’s Achilles heel.

Evaluations mean little when they do not include a full sample of students enrolled in a course. For course-shoppers, this often creates a skewed perception of a class’s quality. For faculty and teaching fellows, this means that feedback is incomplete, making gauging their students’ experience difficult. And administrators, who use teaching evaluations to allocate resources and even make tenure decisions, may only have a fuzzy picture of the quality of teaching in a given class or department.

Last year, undergraduate participation in course evaluations was dismally low, as evidenced by the barrage of frantic e-mails sent by the Registrar’s office as evaluation season was drawing to a close and incentives ranging from free iPods to cash for the House with the highest response rate. It is clear that these appeals are not working. In order to ensure participation, each student should have to complete their course evaluations in order to receive his or her grades at the end of the semester. If a student fails to fill out his or her course evaluations, electronic posting of their grades would be significantly delayed. Such a system is already in place at other schools and would be easy to implement.

Some worry that such a scheme will lead to more but lower quality evaluations as students quickly fill out their Q’s in order to see their grades. This may be the case for some students, but we trust that most students, once forced to go through the process anyway, will take the time to fill out the evaluation conscientiously. At the very least, we will know that delinquent students are truly apathetic.

Evaluations should also take the entire longitudinal course experience into account. Currently the course evaluation tool closes before the final exam in most courses, rendering the information gathered for those classes incomplete. Supporters of this policy argue that a bad experience on a final exam could “taint” a student’s evaluation of a course, making it more likely that they will fill out the questionnaire with a pessimistically, or with revenge in mind. As the capstone of a course, however, the final exam is as integral a component as the assignments completed earlier in the semester and should be evaluated in the same way.

Finally, all professors should be required to offer evaluations at the end of their courses. This has been an astonishingly controversial issue among professors, who hypocritically voted to mandate evaluation for teaching fellows but not themselves. A culture of feedback and improvement cannot be established if faculty see themselves as above evaluation. The Faculty’s recalcitrance also hurts students, who cannot be expected to take their evaluations seriously if professors do not respond to suggestions for improvement and publish their evaluations in the Q Guide.

While the new Q is a step in the right direction, it cannot be considered the end of reform. The Q will only be what it aspires to be if more meaningful changes are enacted to encourage and enforce student and faculty participation in course evaluations.