By Kate Campbell
Senior staff writer
For students like Amii Follmer, faculty evaluations often come at the end of a strenuous exam and are the last sheet of paper between her and a break.
“It’s like, ‘All right, just take your final real quick and you can be free if you fill out this multiple choice [questionnaire],” said the sophomore psychology major. “The only time I take them really seriously is if I really dislike a professor.”
If the University Senate passes one of its longest-running proposals Monday, teaching evaluations will no longer disappear into faculty filing cabinets, and students will gain free online access to others’ opinions of their future instructors without having to pay for a commercial rating service such as Pick-a-Prof.com. The university’s most powerful policy making body has been deliberating the measure in some form since 2000. Senate officials have said they are optimistic the proposal will pass.
If the proposal passes in its current form, all students would have access to the voluntary anonymous online evaluation results at any time. Those who fail to submit them will have to wait until the end of the semester when the evaluation period is over and all the data has been compiled, said Dennis Kivlighan, a professor in the counseling and personnel services department and chairman of the committee charged with drafting the proposal.
“If students want access to this type of information as they’ve said they do, they’ll need to submit evaluations,” he said. “But if they don’t participate then there’s no way to get that information.”
The early access to evaluation results is meant to act as an incentive for students to fill out the evaluations, he said, and to quell some senators’ concerns that students will neglect to fill out evaluations if they are not done in class.
Follmer said some of her language classes have switched to online evaluations, which she prefers.
“I’m more likely to spend more time with it because you can do it on your own time whenever you feel like sitting down,” Follmer said.
If the senate passes the proposal, the provost’s office will have a year to formulate the questions and students should be able to use the service at the end of the next fall semester.
While students disagree on how much a professor’s reputation influences their decision to take a course, many have said they would use the service should the senate approve it.
“It will be helpful to see how students responded to the teachers,” said LaKeyetta Reed, a senior psychology major, who uses word-of-mouth to evaluate a professor in a prospective course.
Currently, students who wish to see other students’ evaluations of faculty must pay $5 to subscribe to Pick-a-Prof.com. Terpunderground.com provided a similar free service before it closed down about two years ago. Terplife.com launched in June but has yet to garner much discussion of professors. All three services are run by private companies.
The Student Government Association subscribed the university to Pick-a-Prof for five semesters – fall 2002 through fall 2004 – at a cost of $10,000 to launch and $6,000 to operate annually. The SGA decided not to renew the service because too few students took advantage of it to justify the money spent, said SGA chief of staff Devin Ellis. He said the current SGA administration considered resubscribing this year for $32,000 per year, but decided the money could better go to funding student groups and other initiatives, such as the Collegiate Readership program, which brought free newspapers to the campus.
Kivlighan said when the committee studied students’ use of Pick-a-Prof.com during the time it was sponsored by the SGA, they found some classes only had a 5 percent response rate.
Ellis said he doesn’t remember an outcry when the SGA decided to discontinue their subscription, but students such as senior cell biology and molecular genetics major Mark Masciocchi point to the usefulness of such an online option.
“When they’re done online I can take all the time in the world,” Masciocchi said. “When you type them out online you can feel totally secure in voicing your opinion.”
Contact reporter Kate Campbell at campbelldbk@gmail.com.
