At this point, students have finally emerged from beneath the dark cloud of finals week, crawled out of their hideaways in Gelman Library and walked away from their papers, their classes and their professors.
Many will look back on their spring semester — or even their entire academic year — and remember achievements and inspiring professors. But unfortunately, some students will undoubtedly reflect on their semester and see failure and struggle.
It isn’t uncommon for these unhappy memories to revolve around an experience with a professor. Often, students are left wishing they had known that their professor would grade so harshly or fail to answer important emails. If students had as much information about classes and professors as possible while making their course selections, many of the problems that they experience with professors could be alleviated.
The solution is simple: The University should release, at least in part, the electronic and written class evaluations submitted at the end of each semester. It’s crucial for students to find classes and professors that fit their academic style, and it’s difficult to do so without a clear picture of a professor’s teaching methods.
I’ve been lucky. During my time at GW, I haven’t had any professors that I would describe as ineffective or bad. However, during my sophomore year, I had a professor who was entirely apathetic about a subject in which I was deeply interested. He missed all of his office hours, skipped three pre-established meetings with me without apology and refused to talk to students at the beginning of class. I would have never taken his class had I known that my experience would be so poor.
Some officials and professors at GW have called for evaluations to be made public in the past, but it’s unclear whether there has been much progress.
Official course evaluations are better representations of a professor’s style than any website, like RateMyProfessors, because they come from much larger sample sizes. Students who post on RateMyProfessors are likely more honest about their experiences in the class. But these online reviews arguably only represent the extremes: students who loved the class or students who hated the class.
The department-issued evaluations likely include fewer specific personal experiences, but can benefit students by providing a broad, reliable summary of the class and the professor. And accountability is paramount. Students need to be given as much information as possible about professors in order to get their money’s worth. Right now, course evaluations aren’t really benefiting students in the ways that they should.
The infrastructure for providing evaluations to students is already in place. This year, GW created a syllabus bank on Blackboard, where students can access syllabi for an upcoming class before registering. The University could create a similar database for evaluations and could offer the electronic reviews, averages of the written reviews, or both.
At the GW Law School, professor and class ratings are readily accessible to all law students. However, only one department at GW that teaches undergraduate courses makes its course evaluations available: the computer science department. Currently, most academic departments use course evaluations within the department to evaluate their own faculty.
Some universities already release faculty and course reviews, as well as the grade distribution for a given course in a given year. At Georgetown University, one of GW’s peer schools, some evaluation results are published in the schedule of classes, though faculty can opt out. New York University School of Law releases aggregate scores for each class at the end of every semester, but not the specific reviews supplied by students.
Some experts have argued that course evaluations provide valuable data about students’ experiences in classes, but are not necessarily the best measure of a professor’s effectiveness.
But if professors use these reviews for future jobs or promotions, then academic departments must consider them to be an accurate summary of a professor’s performance. Therefore, they could prove to be instrumental to students as they determine whether or not a class is a good fit for them based on their peers’ experiences.
Ultimately, students are the ones who suffer from unhelpful professors. They should at least be given the tools to choose the good over the bad.
Andrew Costello, a junior double majoring in political science and economics, is a Hatchet opinions writer. Want to respond to this piece? Submit a letter to the editor.
