A CUE for Improvement

For the last several semesters, low CUE guide participation rates have hampered both pedagogical improvement and students’ academic experience. Despite desperate tactics—haranguing e-mails from everyone from the president of the University to one of the stars of the football team, Clifton G. Dawson ’07—Harvard cannot seem to get students to fill out their CUE guide evaluations.

Considering both the significant monetary savings that have resulted from moving CUE evaluations online and the vast decrease in response that has resulted, we are compelled to support faculty legislation that would make CUE evaluations mandatory for all students. Such a system, which has been successfully enacted at Yale, would withhold grades from students who have not filled out their course evaluations either until they do so or until a certain amount of time has passed.

The problem is that a student’s incentives to fill out their CUE evaluations—which at present amount to a miniscule chance of winning a free iPod or cash for one’s house—fail to offset the time it takes to fill out evaluations, especially if a student may not reap the benefit of using the CUE guide to shop for classes in the future. The opportunity to see one’s grades early, however, would provide a far stronger incentive to spend a few minutes to evaluate a course.

Nevertheless, the carrot must accompany the stick; CUE evaluations should be open to until a week or two after finals period. During reading and exam periods, most students would rather spend the hour or two it would take to fill out their CUEs studying. Making the evaluations available after final exams would not only alleviate this pressure; it would also allow the incorporation of feedback on a course’s final in a student’s responses. We find the argument that a student’s experience with a course’s final will skew his or her responses unconvincing; final exams are integral to a course’s substance and should be evaluated as such.

If anything, the limited window for filling out CUE evaluations causes the sample of responses to be skewed, potentially providing future students with a poor representation of the realities of the class. It also limits the ability for feedback for pedagogical improvement. Even so, we recognize that filling out CUE evaluations is also a student’s responsibility to the University. If students want better teaching at Harvard, they must fill out their CUE evaluations; without them the University has no means to separate the good instructors from the bad.

With this in mind, we are incredibly dismayed by the objections of many members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to allowing professors to exempt themselves from having their courses evaluated. CUE evaluations are virtually the only way that professors currently receive feedback on their teaching and administrators can have some level of oversight over instructors. It has been argued that, in doing so, professorial autonomy would be limited, but this consideration is vastly less important than the imperative to improve education at Harvard College.

As the year ends, we wish to stress the importance of CUE guide evaluations and urge the University to make them mandatory for both professors and students. We hope that lengthening the window in which CUE guide evaluations can be filled out aids in this matter; we are optimistic that Harvard students take them seriously. But without cooperation on CUE evaluations from students, faculty, administrators—combined with the right set of incentives and priorities—improving the quality of education at Harvard College will amount to merely reaching around in the dark.