Get Out Your Pencils

It is almost the end of the term, and you're not going to take it anymore. After an entire shopping week's worth of market research searching for the best, most interesting, most useful or easiest courses to take, you now realize how wrong everyone was. That so-called "gut" required far more guts than you expected. That purportedly "lucid and inspiring" professor made you wish that you were less than lucid during class. Or maybe the entire experience would have been just dandy, had it not been for the Teaching Fellow from Hell. In short, you were duped. Wronged. Spurned. Maligned. Dropped into the dust heap of "Rank Group III". You are no longer dealing with a handful of wrath or a smattering of ill-will. Oh, no. The time has come for revenge.

Luckily for you, it's CUE Guide Time!

Those students who have been skipping lectures for the past three months out of sheer resentment would be wise to attend classes this week. As instructors hand out feedback forms for the Committee on Undergraduate Education Course Evaluation Guide, students finally have their chance to rant or rave on paper about everything that has been making their academic lives into heaven or hell and inform their peers appropriately.

Unfortunately, too few students take advantage of this opportunity. Somehow, students' fears and frustrations concerning their courses tend to dissipate the moment those lovely ScanTron forms appear. CUE Guide forms need to be distributed on previously-specified days so that all students can take advantage of the forms. Nearly eighty-five ninety-sevenths of those who bother filling out the forms hail and applaud their professors and teaching fellows, bestowing fours and fives upon them with reckless abandon. Only a handful bother with twos or threes and only the tiniest smattering of students dare to bubble in a one. A large minority of respondents do not even write any comments at all, preferring to leave future students to their unadvised fates.

Meanwhile, the CUE Guide is under attack. Some administrators have threatened to remove one of the Guide's most helpful features, its endorsement of individual teaching fellows. Unless this is part of a sinister plot to impede our education in the name of public image, there appears to be no logical reason for this move. The sad fact of many of Harvard's courses is that teaching fellows are the ones doing most of the teaching, making the names of recommended TFs even more important than those of recommended professors. If anything, more TFs should be rated, not fewer.

At a school where advising is one of the greatest institutional weaknesses, the CUE Guide is one of the last bastions of unbiased and even-handed advice. But in order for it to be useful, students have to be both thorough and brutally honest in their feedback. Just because our grades are inflated does not mean that our professors' should be. When you receive that CUE Guide form this week, tell the truth. Future generations of Harvard students will be forever grateful.