We’re Halfway There

In a perfect world, the lines of communication between students and professors would always be open; feedback on coursework and lectures could flow both ways without interference. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Students often become negligent or withdraw outright from difficult courses, and professors frequently become blind and deaf with regard to student feedback. At Harvard, where courses can have enrollments of hundreds of students, this breakdown in communication can often lead to widespread frustration on the part of students, and even genuinely well-intentioned faculty members can seem unreachable.

While Harvard has a functioning and fairly well-regarded system of pedagogical feedback—the Q guide, formerly published by the Committee on Undergraduate Evaluation (CUE) and now by a combination of the CUE and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS)— the current apparatus is insufficient for giving feedback to professors and teaching fellows during the actual course of the semester. The CUE is now convening to consider a more streamlined and enforcible system for both midterm grading and evaluation. Professors and teaching fellows will be required to give students an indication of their relative progress in the course, something sorely lacking in many seminars and paper-oriented courses; and students will have a mechanism to give feedback to their professors. Both of these measures will, we hope, adequately address the broken lines of communication between students and faculty.

This new system will have various benefits. First off, it will provide teaching staff an opportunity to help academically struggling students before they fall through the proverbial cracks. Especially in classes that center around classroom discussion, students often have no barometer for their performance in a course until the final term paper is graded—at which point, nothing can be done to salvage his or her grade. Motivated students who may have been unaware of their subpar performance in a course will now have an opportunity to take ownership of their education and have frank discussions with either teaching fellows or professors, while resident tutors and deans can be better informed of their students’ overall well being.

Moreover, much like how the current Q Guide measures professors’ performance at the end of the term, an enforceable and online midterm evaluation system for professors and teaching fellows would allow students and professors to effect changes in the way that a course is taught throughout the course of the term. For example, adjustments to course syllabi based on these evaluations could be made on a more frequent basis, and section leaders could alter the tone of discussion during meetings by simply reading anonymous reports from students. Much like the present Q system, students could submit their feedback online, and the Q Guide could even be expanded to show which professors respond well to student feedback.

While we certainly understand the criticisms of those who fear that this change would simply add to the already cumbersome bureaucracy at University Hall, we firmly assert that this new program would have a beneficial impact on the College as a whole. Enforcing midterm evaluations and grading would ultimately help, not hinder, Harvard’s oft-bemoaned pedagogy.