Student Opinion Counts

A new idea has been growing in education. It is to consider students' opinions on the quality of their instructors. Michigan University has adopted a plan to get these opinions, as has the Harvard Chemistry Department.

This year the Chemistry Department departed from a University-wide tradition of indifference to section teaching by offering eleven prizes to the men who rate highest on a poll conducted among the members of the six big undergraduate chemistry courses. The poll, devised by Professor Kistiakowsky, chairman of the department, questions students as to the personality and scientific ability of their section man as well as to the time they think he contributes to teaching. The prizes, each amounting to slightly under a hundred dollars, will come from a fund given by a Visiting Committee of the Board of Overseers.

Though inaugurated before the publication of the Poskanzer Report, the Chemistry Department's plan follows very closely the Student Council Committee's recommendations that the student be consulted in his own education and that the faculty profit by the student's suggestions to improve teaching methods. Not only has the Chemistry Department offered prizes for better instructing but has also set up a program of lectures for their teaching fellows and a routine of frequent inspections to supervise their work. Section men who persist in a casual attitude toward students will have their fellowships discontinued for the following year.

Recognition of the student's evaluation of his teachers is a valuable and practical attitude for the Chemistry Department to assume. After all, it is the student himself who knows whether or not he is really learning; more than that, the results of the Chemistry Department's poll indicate that the students' views as to a man's teaching ability correspond remarkably well to the opinions of the senior members of the department as to his promise in chemistry. But recognition is not enough; in establishing an active program for improving section men's teaching efforts, the department has set a precedent worthwhile of notice by the rest of the University.