This is your cue to fill out the Q (in earnest)

For many Harvard students, navigating Cambridge and Boston comes down to one letter: the T. For navigating courses at Harvard, however, it often comes down to the Q, a database of student evaluations of prior courses and teaching staff.

In the often highly exclusive environment that is Harvard, the Q Guide democratizes access to knowledge about this institution and provides vital information from students’ own experiences on a widely accessible platform. This is especially relevant for students who arrive on campus without a network of peers — First-Generation, Low-Income students; students from underrepresented backgrounds; students not from preparatory high schools; and so on. Critically, the Q also allows for these students to share their experiences, to highlight the issues they face, and create a virtual network of peers.

At its best, the Q Guide is a campus-wide effort by students to look out for one another’s academic endeavors. At its worst, the Q Guide provides a platform where students weaponize anonymity and leave mean-spirited reviews that transform the Q into their personal hate mail pigeon. When some comments published in the Q Guide for all students to read condemn and only condemn, we question the extent to which they are useful. Such behavior conveys a disappointing lack of empathy for teaching staff, as if trying to exact retribution for a course that has personally “wronged” them.

Beyond unconstructive criticism, the credibility of Q Guide comments can be discounted by our implicit biases that color our judgments and subtly dictate the vocabulary we use in evaluating teaching staff. As a result, multiple Harvard faculty have expressed doubt in Q Guide reviews’ capacity to reflect instructors’ true teaching ability. Seth Robertson, a lecturer in Philosophy, explained: “White, male, cis, able-bodied instructors with regular voices get repeated as much more credible.” For instructors whose identities and appearances may not align with unspoken expectations of competency, Q Guide reviews can be guided by unjust preconceptions and run the risk of reinforcing harmful stereotypes that endanger the quality of scholarship and pedagogy at Harvard and beyond.

Professors and their teaching staff need feedback on how to better cater their courses to their students, and we should give it to them. Yet, the bottom line remains: Teaching staff — no matter their perception as the best or the worst in students’ minds — deserve to be treated with and spoken about with respect and dignity. Empathy should not be an ideal; it is the bare minimum. We must always remember that our words fall upon real people, whose professional careers and characters can be marred by unnecessarily harsh and insensitive reviews. By acknowledging this responsibility and the potential consequences, students, faculty, and employers alike should be mindful both in writing reviews and forming judgments based on them. Given the Q’s spacious room for error and uncertainty, a negative review should never be the irreversible verdict of an academic career.

Still, the Q, or some iteration of it, will always be in circulation by students seeking insight into courses. With that in mind, students should leave comments in earnest. Currently, the largely polarizing, either extremely positive or extremely negative comments on the Q, while sketching a vague contour of past experiences, do not truly reflect any course. Individual experiences are valuable cornerstones that help build our current understanding and later institutional memory of courses at Harvard, but to only express the overtly positive or negative prescribes an overwhelming absolutism: creating the illusion of a singularly possible learning experience that fails to capture an entire world of academic pursuits at Harvard. We ask that you exercise your power as a reviewer wisely: Just as you hope to find fair and useful comments on a course you’re interested in, others rely on your thoughtful, dependable feedback too.

Similarly, in your capacity as a reader of the Q Guide, we ask that you read it wisely, much like how you would (hopefully) read The Crimson: Carefully, with respect for both yourself and the writer as humans that can differ in experience and perspective, and with your own judgment. Aside from the Q, utilize Canvas sites, course syllabi, and external evaluations on teaching staff to formulate a better-informed characterization of a course.

So take this as our cue to you: If you care about the Q’s credibility and utility, then you must all take care and consideration into what you put into it — because that is exactly what you will get out of it.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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