I’m thankful for hot turkey and gravy at the dinner table, along with cranberries and cheesecake (pumpkin pie isn’t a big hit in my house). I’m thankful for Thanksgiving Day, the only day in months where I was able to sleep from three in the morning until five in the evening and not fall behind on classes. However, the thing for which I’m most thankful in this column is having filled out course evaluations.
That may sound all but entirely dorky, but I am serious. Really. When I consider middle school and high school, there wasn’t one chance to do anything like course evaluations, the closest thing being making a voluntary trip to the principal’s office – or to the teacher himself – to complain about the teaching, and even then I was certain I wouldn’t be getting much done. So, having been a student of par-for-the-course public schools, I relished filling out the course evaluations right after receiving the e-mail informing me that they were up online. (Of course, I’m not writing in a newspaper how I specifically rated my courses, so I’ll just say that every course I’m taking this semester, as well as every course taught by a professor under whom I still intend to take classes, has been at least very good and very enjoyable.)
For some classes, students are given an incentive to fill out evaluations; sometimes it’s an extra point on the final exam, or the dropping of the lowest quiz score. If I remember correctly from general chemistry lab last year, bonus points for the final exam increased proportionally to the number of students who submitted evaluations. I’m not certain, however, what incentive professors have themselves to provide these bonus points; maybe it’s something required for the large lecture classes, where there were always bonus points for submitting evaluations, or maybe it’s just a point of principle for them. But even if there is no incentive of that sort, I feel like submitting a course evaluation is rewarding in itself. On a charitable level, it ensures that for a course you’ve rated as poor there will be in the future improvements to the course and/or another, hopefully better, professor. (And remember that I have certainly not rated any of my current courses as poor.) On a more self-serving level, submitting course evaluations helps ensure that good professors – maybe to phrase it differently, good teacher – will remain to teach in the future. Last semester, on the last day of an English literature course, the class was asked to write an evaluation of the professor, who advised us to be serious about it; one of her previous students, apparently, had commented at length in the evaluation on the professor’s fashion sense. According to her – she was an assistant professor at the time, I think – these evaluations were taken seriously by the department.
Filling out course evaluations, I think, isn’t unlike voting. Realistically, you have little say in things, because your evaluation-vote can be negated by opposing evaluation-votes, and a single evaluation-vote cannot, unless in a particularly small course, tip the balance one way or another.
Nonetheless, some influence over the courses and professors is better than no influence. So – for those of you who have course evaluations yet to submit – go fill them out, and feel good for letting the system know how you think things are and how they should be. And then watch one of those funny thank-you-for-filling-out-your-course evaluations videos on YouTube.
David is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].