Sophomore Advising Program a Success

The College’s sophomore advising program was declared to have been a success after its first full semester in effect, during the Committee on House Life meeting yesterday.

Laura K. Johnson, the assistant Dean for Sophomore Advising, presented an assessment of the program based on a summary of information from the most recent House Life Survey.

The questions addressed issues regarding availability, efficiency, and accessibility of House advisers, who are mostly resident tutors assigned to students with similar academic interests.

Sophomores reported that they either agreed or strongly agreed with statements assessing their third semester advising experiences.

“‘Strongly agree?’ For this campus? I mean, that’s very positive,” Associate Dean of Residential Life Suzy M. Nelson said after hearing the numbers.

The data for the twelve Houses were presented “blind,” so it is impossible to know which House received higher rankings; figures on the assessment were simply labelled “House 1,” “House 2,” etc.

However, the data suggest student assessment of the new advising initiative is fairly standard across campus.

“I was really happy that the numbers appeared to be very clustered, that there seems to be a consistency across all the houses,” said Undergraduate Council (UC) representative Alyssa Q. Colbert ’10. “That’s good to hear, especially having heard in the past anecdotes about them not being consistent.”

Yet despite rumors of lackluster support for sophomore advising preceding the class of 2010, no past data were presented with the survey’s results, making it difficult to compare this year’s data with former sophomores’ opinions.

“There’s not a lot you can do about it,” UC representative Jon T. Staff V ’10 said of the lack of comparative data. “The way I look at it is: I’m very happy about the numbers this year. They will become more meaningful as we have comparative data in years coming. This is a brand new program, and it’s good that we’re keeping data from the very beginning.”

“Since there has not been a College-wide sophomore advising program in recent years, the lack of data isn’t directly relevant in that sense. We will be looking at past assessments of advising in general in the sophomore year for comparisons wherever possible,” Johnson, who spoke at the meeting, wrote in an e-mailed statement.

But Dunster House Master Ann R. Porter said that the new advising program is not radically different from previous years’ advising in her house.

And the survey’s high rankings do not necessarily translate into success, according to Adams House master Sean G. Palfrey ’67.

“This is not an idea of success; this is an idea of appreciation, and that’s great. But we don’t know whether it did the right thing yet. We’ve got some years to go,” he said.

—Staff writer Abby D. Phillip can be reached at adphill@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Charles J. Wells can be reached at wells2@fas.harvard.edu.