Though I occasionally enjoy the mindless pleasure of filling out colorful Scantron forms with little golf pencils, UCLA’s official process for evaluating professors is incredibly outdated and inefficient.
This quarterly procedure asks students to fill out double-sided evaluation forms for both professors and teaching assistants during the last normal class meeting of a course before final exams.
While the evaluations may help instructors make curricula more accessible to students, the current process is incredibly wasteful of student and faculty time and unnecessarily consumes university resources.
Yet on a more important pedagogical level, the system fails to provide a reliable forum for students to access and learn from fellow students’ academic experiences.
At a tech-savvy university like UCLA, where students can check library reserves, sign up for classes and receive academic counseling online through MyUCLA and URSA, it’s time we follow the example set by other major universities.
Official evaluations should be available for students to fill out and view online.
In the current evaluation process, instructors hand out forms and leave the room, usually giving students between 10 and 30 minutes to complete the evaluations.
It is then a student volunteer’s responsibility to collect the evaluations in an envelope and deliver them back to the academic department office, where they must be sorted, scanned and appropriately distributed.
The entire system is tedious for professors, teaching assistants, and administrative staff, who must oversee the process repeatedly every quarter.
Yet students miss out the most because they are losing valuable time in class. In a typical undergraduate student schedule consisting of three lectures and two or three discussions, at least an hour of valuable 10th week class time is lost per student per quarter.
The procedure also has a negative environmental impact. Considering that there are over 25,000 undergraduates enrolled at UCLA, there are hundreds of thousands of evaluation forms being filled out every year unnecessarily. I can only imagine what vast underground vault or black hole it would take to swallow such paperwork.
Fortunately, the technology to implement a digital professor evaluation system already exists and would be ideal for UCLA.
Beginning in fall 2006, Stanford University implemented a new online evaluation system, replacing an older scanned-form method similar to UCLA’s current system.
Students must complete the forms for each class in order to receive grades when they are posted or be forced to wait until the beginning of the next quarter to receive them. Thus, turnout is high and reflects an accurate representation of student opinion.
The campus doesn’t seem to miss the old system.
“It was highly inefficient and took a great deal of time and effort to administer,” said Roger Printup, Stanford’s former registrar and associate vice provost for student affairs in a press release following the change.
Aside from saving class time and paper, the process allows the students to complete the final examination before they turn in evaluations, which may change their assessment of the difficulty of a course.
Able to complete the evaluations in privacy after finals, students feel less rushed to finish and can take the time to make more poignant assessments in filling them out.
Though Stanford has chosen to keep its evaluation results private, the process would allow for an accurate and complete database of professor reviews to be put online for student and administrative use.
While there are unofficial sources, such as bruinwalk.com, that allow students to publicly express educational experiences, these sites contain an unrepresentative sample from only a few students who choose to log on and submit a review.
“I never read the reviews because they’re only written by students who either really liked or hated the professor,” said Brian Gay, a third-year communication studies student.
Similarly, Pick-A-Prof is a Web site that provides access to official grade distribution records ““ the number of A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and F’s given by each professor per quarter ““ yet it fails to correlate scores with an accurate written appraisal from each student.
“(Students) shouldn’t be discouraged from taking a professor simply because he only gives one or two A’s a quarter. In this respect, a qualitative analysis would be valuable with this data,” said Addar Weintraub, Undergraduate Students Association Council academic affairs commissioner.
An official professor evaluation system through MyUCLA would allow for reviews to be easily correlated with the grades students receive, presenting a complete and accurate picture of a course and an indication of any possible unfair student biases.
Though some may object to having such a database online, it would replace less reliable unofficial sources, in which students who may not have even taken a class can chime in.
It’s time for UCLA to bring professor evaluations into the 21st century, saving time and resources while creating an accurate and helpful forum for students to select classes.
E-mail Noble at bnoble@media.ucla.edu.