Down With The Q

Ever since Harvard placed the Q Guide between eager students and their grades, evaluation participation has skyrocketed. With many classes seeing response levels above 90 percent, the Q guide seems to have become a far more valuable resource for those furiously shopping for classes. Students are now able to gain wisdom from former class enrollees and are endowed with gems of knowledge such as: “LifeSci 1b is the worst course I have ever taken, and if you have any respect for yourself and your sanity at all, you will not enroll in this course. It sets a new standard and performs as a paradigm for exactly how dreadful a class can possibly be.”

In many ways, the Q guide serves as an exclusive Ratemyprofessor.com, a website that few Harvard students take much stock in. Indeed, for some, the Q is akin to a Harvard bible. However, the Q is cueing students to fixate on the wrong particulars of a given course.

While student advice is no doubt helpful to consider when choosing classes, the first thing a student should consider is not a number but rather their own strengths, weaknesses, and interests. It is not uncommon to hear a student say, “I’m shopping that class. It got a 4.2 on the Q.” What about shopping a class because it is genuinely intriguing? These days, it seems that the Q has become so powerful that it encourages students to focus less on what they’re actually interested in and more on highly subjective and, it must be said, irrelevant numbers, not to mention the often unconstructive (and sometimes hilarious) student commentary. Additionally, the Q fails to account for courses that have been revamped and modified, perhaps based on the very responses the evaluation garnered the previous year.

This also raises the question of whom the Q guide is actually for. A professor is probably unlikely to gain much feedback from a response such as the one disgruntled LifeSci 1b student gave: “How much of your soul are you willing to cut out and sacrifice to your pre-med vision?” Even assigning a number to enthusiasm and effectiveness seems to be entirely subjective, depending on which student is asked.

Naturally, the anonymity the Internet provides on a site like Ratemyprofessor.com extends to the Q guide, which has obvious ostensible advantages. Without knowing who gave the comment, however, all context is removed. There is no way to know anything about the source—what year the student was, how much they know about the subject, if they ever went to class or studied, or if, say, the commenting student was destined to hate any class that required a paper longer than six pages or any sort of math that includes more than one variable. In more than one class, Q comments often blatantly contradict each other. One person, for instance, might claim that the class is impossible if one hasn’t taken Ec10, but the very next comment might advise that no economic knowledge is necessary whatsoever. 

Harvard encourages some level of individuality when it comes to learning—offering designable tutorials and a wide variety of options when it comes to fulfilling Gen Ed requirements. Yet, the Q guide fails to encourage students to think critically and constructively about their individual interests and learning style.

In just about every class there is a student who loves it, one who hates it, one who was overwhelmed, or one who has been studying the subject for years and could do the work with their eyes closed. The only way for a student to know what category he or she falls into is to try it.

Erika P. Pierson ’12, a former Crimson arts associate editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House.