CUEing Up

As the end of term quickly approaches, the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) is considering an overhaul of the existing course evaluation system. At present, the CUE evaluation guide is compiled from student-based analyses of their current course loads—an assessment of professors, workload and difficulty, among a number of criteria—in effort to provide prospective enrollees with a valuable tool when selecting classes. The CUE Guide’s full potential, however, is hardly being realized at the moment, and there are many revisions of the current system that the Committee should consider.

Currently, students are asked to fill out course evaluations during a final lecture or section, as the instructor graciously exits to avoid biased or inhibited critique. Students are allowed the requisite 20 minutes to complete course appraisals consisting of numerous bubble-responses and a few prompts for the students to jot comments regarding the course’s merits and shortcomings. Many involved in the CUE’s revamp have suggested that evaluations make room for more lengthy remarks—a step in the right direction in becoming more comprehensive, but because of its ill-timed administration, it is still an inaccurate gauge of students’ opinion.

The reality of the end-of-year mentality can not be ignored; with many CUE Guide evaluations having to include often small percentages of participating students, steps must be taken to ensure a greater response rate.

Sadly, only the truly dedicated students file into sparsely filled lecture halls at the end of the year. As a result, those present for CUE evaluations are most likely to be more partial to the course than those who do not get their hands on a form. In order to secure a less biased response, the evaluations should be administered before final exams, which will allow for centralization and acquire a true reflection of students’ sentiment—as absenteeism would no longer be an obstacle.

For those classes requiring no final, it should be mandatory that students include an evaluation with whatever final paper or project the course entails. This minor adjustment would save class time and produce much more accurate information by eliminating non-response bias.

With more comprehensive data, it would be necessary to smarten the CUE guide’s rather rudimentary website. Personalized responses from students should appear online to be accessed by perusing Harvard students—with particularly telling responses excerpted and included in the course write-ups—as well as the statistics from the course’s rating results. An integration of the online course catalogue, class syllabi and a revamped CUE guide would also be an effective tool—giving students a variety of necessary class-selection resources at their fingertips.

Evaluations that are based on a minute representation of enrolled students lead to unwarranted assessment averages and skew the overall effectiveness of the guide. But with minor changes to the current evaluation system and an integrated online network, the CUE guide will provide accurate, easily accessible reviews.