The results of the university-distributed professor evaluations could potentially be made available to students within the upcoming academic year.
The numerical data from the end-of-quarter professor evaluations are at the center of a proposal currently in the works by Marwa Kaisey, president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council.
According to the Daily Bruin archives, professor evaluations were available in booklets published by the Office of Instructional Development until 1995. The booklets were discontinued because of high printing costs.
But it is high time to bring them back, Kaisey said.
In her term as general representative for USAC last year, Kaisey came to believe that students need a more statistically reliable source of information about how former students felt about their classes than bruinwalk.com, the Web site many students currently use to evaluate professors.
Bruinwalk.com allows students to rate aspects of a professor such as effectiveness, difficulty and availability on a scale of one to 10.
Kaisey is currently preparing a proposal for the new evaluation system to submit to the Academic Senate.
“We saw a real need for more information on the teaching systems of the professors,” Kaisey said.
The professor evaluations probably provide the most representative data of student reactions to particular professors, said Dwight Read, chairman of the UCLA Faculty Association and a professor of anthropology.
“In a general sense, I think it’s reasonable for students to get more information about courses,” Read said.
However, Read said, faculty privacy is a concern which constantly comes up in releasing information such as professor evaluations to the public.
The current widespread quibble with bruinwalk.com is that the site allows students to post anonymous comments about professors, an aspect which Kaisey believes should be changed.
“Right now through bruinwalk anyone can review any class. It’s kind of a free-for-all, so we want to get it more organized through the university,” Kaisey said.
In an ideal situation, Kaisey would allow professors a space to fill out a blurb about themselves, and students wouldn’t be able to write comments about professors.
There are a few concerns that come up with Kaisey’s proposed system of using only the numerical data from the end-of-quarter evaluations, Read said.
One concern Read presented is that the written data on the back of the evaluations are the most useful part of the process and convey an entirely different impression than the numerical scores alone do.
The other concern that comes up with student evaluations is grade inflation, which has increased substantially over the years. According to Read, if faculty perceive that students evaluate them in terms of how many people get As and Bs in their courses and know that those evaluations are used by their departments in the review process, it can be seriously problematic.
“The problem is more in terms of how faculty perceive the evaluations are used in the review process,” Read said.
For now, the idea of seeing the results of the end-of-quarter evaluations seems like a good one to Maxwell Kaizer, a fourth-year art history student.
“They’ll have a lot of information that would be useful,” Kaizer said.
As to not seeing the written comments on the backs of the evaluation forms, Kaizer said, “It’s OK because a lot of times people will get really personal with what they write on the back.”
Though he doesn’t enjoy filling out the professor evaluations, Kaizer said he and other students would probably spend more time on them if they knew the data would be published online.
“In big classes a lot of times when people get the evaluation forms a lot of people just get up and leave,” Kaizer said. “Less people will leave if they get to see the actual, physical information online.”