CUE Proposes Placing Course Evaluations Online

A proposal to put undergraduate course evaluation forms online was endorsed by the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) yesterday and could be implemented as early as next fall pending the approval of the Faculty Council.

Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz also told the CUE that course add/drop fees will be reduced beginning next fall and are expected to eventually be completely eliminated.

Under the course evaluation proposal, an online system would replace the current process in which students fill out paper evaluations at the end of each term to be used in the CUE Guide, the popular course-ranking booklet.

Although the CUE will revise the proposal in a meeting at the beginning of March, Registrar Barry Kane said he is optimistic that course evaluations will be online as early as the Fall 2004 semester.

Kane said he thought Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 and Wolcowitz “were certainly on board with this.”

“If that’s any indication of where this is going, I think its a pretty strong one,” he said.

At the meeting, CUE members heard a report on a pilot program conducted by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences last semester, which allowed students enrolled in 16 different graduate-level courses to complete anonymous online evaluations.

The online form was similar in content to the evaluations currently used in undergraduate courses and included both multiple choice and free answer questions concerning course material, professors, and teaching fellows (TFs).

David Heitmeyer, who presented the findings of the GSAS study on behalf of Faculty of Arts and Sciences Computer Services, said that immediate processing of evaluation data, more accurate recording methods and easy availability of data to instructors and TFs were among the advantages of online evaluations.

Gross told the committee that the current system was inconvenient because of its reliance on massive amounts of paperwork.

But the GSAS pilot saw a disappointing response rate of 13 percent, with some courses seeing zero students complete an evaluation. The highest response rate for any single class was 36 percent.

But Kane said the College would be able to avoid similarly low response rates. Before coming to Harvard this September, Kane served for six years as registrar at Yale, which shifted to online course evaluations during the 2002-2003 academic year and enjoyed an 87 percent response rate. Harvard’s current system earns a 70 percent response rate, CUE officials said.

The key to Yale’s success was what CUE members called a “carrot-and-stick policy” which did not allow students to view their course grades online unless they had either filled out a course evaluation or opted out of doing so. Yale also conducted an advertising blitz when evaluation time neared.

“The culture we wanted to create at Yale was one where evaluating a course was as important an obligation as taking a course,” said Kane, who prescribes similar advertising measures for Harvard.

Professors at the meeting said they were pleased that an online system would allow them to add course-specific questions to the evaluations they submit to their students, though Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History Lisa McGirr said a carrot-and-stick policy would have to be part of the process to maintain sufficiently high response rates.

Undergraduate Council President Matt W. Mahan ’05, who was not at the meeting, said he strongly endorsed the move to place course evaluations online.

“Going online would make the feedback mechanism produce lengthier and more thoughtful responses,” Mahan said. “Professors and TFs spend an entire semester teaching us. They deserve to get solid feedback on their work just as we deserve comments on our papers and exams.”

Later in the meeting, Wolcowitz announced a reduction in the fees charged to students who add and drop a course after study cards are due. While currently students are charged $5 for an add/drop change the first week after study cards are due, $10 the second and $15 the third week, beginning next fall students will not be charged for changes during the first week after study cards are due, while the fee for the third week will be reduced to $10. Fees during the second week will remain at $10.

Gross said the fees are used to cover the cost of processing add/drop changes, but that once the process is moved online—perhaps as early as next year—he expects “that we’ll do away with fees.”

Gross also told CUE members that he had been unsuccessful in convincing senior tutors to change the add/drop process to eliminate a required signature by the senior tutor. The tutors feel that reviewing add/drop requests constitutes an “essential” part of their job, Gross said.

CUE member Teddy E. Chestnut ’06 said the best way to eliminate the College’s add/drop problems is to make shopping period more informative and useful to students than it currently is.

Chestnut said placing syllabi for all classes and videotapes of the first lecture for larger classes on course web pages, as well as ensuring that actual lectures— rather than discussions of logistics—take place during shopping period would be improvements to the process.

—Sara E. Polsky contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.