CUE May Change Course Evaluations

The Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) met yesterday after-noon to discuss amending the course evaluation forms that students are asked to fill out each semester.

Two student focus groups, which met last term under the auspices of the committee, assessed every question in the course surveys. The reviews published in the CUE's annual guidebooks are based on the data from these surveys.

In addition to scrutinizing their wording and design, the committee considered three broad changes to the evaluation forms that emerged from the focus groups.

A proposal to introduce a separate survey for Core classes failed to achieve the CUE's endorsement, while the committee agreed to modify the layout of the surveys.

Dean of Undergraduate Education William M. Todd described the change as interspersing "the quantitative with the qualitative."

Each section of bubble questions on the forms will now be followed by a group of related inquiries that demand written responses.

The two kinds of questions appear on different sides of the old surveys.

Third, the committee decided to replace the paragraph of instructions that appears at the top of each survey. An abbreviated version composed in the focus groups will replace the old small-print instructions.

The six Undergraduate Council members in attendance stressed the convenience of being able to check syllabi on the Web.

When a course's reading list is not available in the CUE guide, students said they sometimes use its Web site to judge the workload.