Colleges across the Ivy League have faced student pressure to release course review results to students, with many universities offering online open assessments in some form. Of the eight institutions, all except Dartmouth offer some sort of institutionalized method for students to see course evaluations.
At the May 5 faculty of arts and sciences meeting, a proposal that would have allowed professors at the College to make their course reviews dating back to 2006 accessible online to students was tabled after close to a dozen professors raised concerns.
The initiative has garnered general support among faculty members, with department heads voting to recommend the initiative before the meeting. Professors interviewed pointed to problems with the proposal’s wording and planned implementation while agreeing on the importance of transparency.
At peer institutions, a varying degree of openness exists with regard to faculty evaluations.
At Columbia University, individual departments may choose whether to open evaluations and how much data to release, though an unwieldy online platform has deterred some department heads from releasing evaluations, the Columbia Daily Spectator reported last month. As of April, the university’s information technology department was developing a new platform to ease the process, addressing concerns raised by the Columbia student government in 2012.
At the University of Pennsylvania, reviews collected by the Office of the Provost are made available to faculty, and numerical ratings are released to students via an online website operated by undergraduates.
“The Critical Review,” a Brown University student organization, publishes course reviews from questionnaire responses by students and instructors.
Yale University undergraduates are expected to fill out course reviews for their instructors, according to the University’s website. Doing so allows students early access to grades in some cases.
Yale sophomore Tim Follo said that the school’s course evaluation system is valuable because it pushes all students to submit feedback, eliminating what he called a “potential response bias” that exists among third party course evaluations.
Harvard University and Princeton University also allow students to access past course evaluations and require students to complete them in order to gain early access to their posted grades. Conor McGrory, a sophomore at Princeton University, praised the website’s functionality and said he had used it multiple times to select his courses.
Like their peers at Dartmouth, Yale students created an unofficial online review site. This past January, the non-college sanctioned application, Yale Bluebook Plus, was taken down after the Yale’s registrar sent an email to the two undergraduates who created it. The email highlighted concerns over the use of the Yale logo and that it permitted non-Yale undergraduates to access the site, the Yale Daily News reported.
Asked specifically about the proposed changes at Dartmouth, many faculty members interviewed called for continued discussion of the proposal to open course reviews to undergraduates.
Anthropology department chair Sienna Craig said that while she supports making more information accessible, the current wording of the proposal left many professors concerned. Among other points, the proposal included an evaluation form that would incorporate questions generated by students, which Craig said the faculty felt could lead to biased responses.
Physics professor Brian Chaboyer echoed similar concerns about the types of questions that should be included in evaluation forms, further noting that more discussion was needed on the kinds of factors that online reviews should attempt to evaluate.
“The current form is more set up to help professors to improve their teaching,” he said.
Other professors highlighted concerns with the proposal’s planned implementation. Computer science department chair Tom Cormen said he understood the decision to table the vote and saw it as an opportunity to address concerns raised about implementation.
“I think it’s worthwhile to go back to those committees and iron out those bugs,” he said.
Not all professors interviewed knew of the current options available to Dartmouth students seeking course reviews online. History professor Edward Miller said that current student-run venues for course evaluation tended to be either outdated, biased or both.
“You tend to get two types of reviews, those who love and those who hate it,” he said. “I think it makes it much less useful.”
English and women’s and gender studies professor Ivy Schweitzer also said she was concerned about the quality of reviews currently available to students. Schweitzer suggested selecting students to curate evaluations.
“The evaluations that students have now are so not helpful,” she said. “They don’t ask they kind of questions that we want students to be asking.”
Both Miller and Schweitzer expressed support for greater transparency.
“I very much respect students right to get info about courses and to review courses,” Miller said. “I think it’s part of being a good citizen.”
This is the first time that the issue of open course evaluations has been discussed in a meeting of the faculty of arts and sciences, College Registrar Meredith Braz wrote in an email. By tabling the proposal, Braz wrote, faculty will have more time to consider comments on and changes to the proposal.
Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael Mastanduno did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
