Survey Number 988978655
[Update: Just saw this. Un-freaking-believable. Great minds think alike.]
No ill will intented to BHSA for conducting the survey, but the problem with the evaluations is stunningly simple, and has been kicked around on this blog for years. It's no mystery: because the school doesn't share any meaningful survey results, they're worthless to students. Absolutely worthless. Many of us went to colleges where the process was much more transparent, and when we asked DE a town hall last year what could be done to improve the evaluation process here, DO stepped in and explained that "the faculty are opposed" to further disclosure. That was that. Discussion over. Issue closed. Now that "response rates have been declining," though, they are apparently interested in our feedback.
Stepping off the moral high horse, there are lots of practical reasons students should encourage releasing the narratives of student evaluations. Which professor has threatened to ban laptops? Which professor takes attendance like it's God's work? Which professor buys his pants a size down and stands in the lecture halls with one leg on the podium? We need to know ahead of time! We need to KNOW!
I encourage you use the survey to remind the school that the current evaluation process is, at a bare minimum, mildly insulting to the sudden body, and to point out how easy it would be to turn things around. I also encourage you not to hold your breath for significant change, although I would love to be proven wrong.
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If you are a 2L or a 3L you recently received an e-mail asking to you fill out a survey on what can be done to improve the online teaching evaluation process. Since you probably deleted it as a matter of course, I posted in the comments.No ill will intented to BHSA for conducting the survey, but the problem with the evaluations is stunningly simple, and has been kicked around on this blog for years. It's no mystery: because the school doesn't share any meaningful survey results, they're worthless to students. Absolutely worthless. Many of us went to colleges where the process was much more transparent, and when we asked DE a town hall last year what could be done to improve the evaluation process here, DO stepped in and explained that "the faculty are opposed" to further disclosure. That was that. Discussion over. Issue closed. Now that "response rates have been declining," though, they are apparently interested in our feedback.
Stepping off the moral high horse, there are lots of practical reasons students should encourage releasing the narratives of student evaluations. Which professor has threatened to ban laptops? Which professor takes attendance like it's God's work? Which professor buys his pants a size down and stands in the lecture halls with one leg on the podium? We need to know ahead of time! We need to KNOW!
I encourage you use the survey to remind the school that the current evaluation process is, at a bare minimum, mildly insulting to the sudden body, and to point out how easy it would be to turn things around. I also encourage you not to hold your breath for significant change, although I would love to be proven wrong.
Labels: BHSA, DE, Technology Rants
posted by Patrick Bageant at 11:34 AM
17 Comments:
Forwarded on behalf of BHSA Student Reps on the Curriculum Committee:
Dear 2Ls and 3Ls:
We hope that this email finds your semester going well.
The number of responses to course evaluations has been on the decline. To assist the faculty with diagnosing this problem, we are soliciting your feedback on the process and asking for ideas as to what can be done to improve the process for students. The survey is available at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=37SIokwQxYwNI1obdn2Tdw_3d_3d.
Students responding to the survey will be entered into a drawing for various PRIZES! Prizes include a $25 Strada gift certificate and $10 Peet's gift cards. Winners will be announced by next Wednesday, October 29. The survey will close this Friday, October 24 at noon. Only students who
have experience with Boalt Hall's course evaluation process should participate.
Thank you in advance for participating in this survey. Your answers will help us in ensuring that the course evaluation process serves both students
and the faculty. We appreciate your time!
Best,
Boalt Hall Student Association Representatives,
Teaching and Curriculum Committee
P.S. Yes, we know. We are conducting an online evaluation of an online evaluation system.
From an anonymous e-mailer:
1. You need wider distribution of scores. Every prof getting a 4.4 to a 4.6 doesn't tell us anything. Make it a 1-10 scale.
2. You need to publish comments about the professor. Numbers without context are meaningless. This will cause professors to scream bloody murder, but that's the price.
3. Course listings. This is absolutely retarded. It needs to be scrapped and completely rebuilt.
3a) At a minimum you need a course search function that searches by time. http://www.registrar.ucla.edu/schedule/search.aspx
3b) Preferably you can have a calendar function that shows you how your courses fit on a weekly grid. UCLA has this.
3c) a;lkdfaj;ldsfjlk;adsfjakl;lkasd mother fuck Berkeley IT.
I like how the last question in the survey asks for your name and email (if you want to be included in the drawing that is). Doesn't anonymity encourage sincerity. Oh wait, we don't really care about that in the evaluations process anyway ...
I agree though that I wouldn't hold my breath. It's like the course selection fiasco - how many times do students need to say the same thing before SOMEONE listens???
I would love it if they posted the narrative responses. I spent the better half of an hour filling up every space in the evaluation for Wills & Trusts with Hart0g last spring. I definitely felt my angered ranting of how worthless he was as a professor was worthy of more eyes than just the administration's.
On that note, are we even certain the evals are read by the admins?
@anonymous via patrick @12:06
As a Berkeley alum and member of the (accursed) Berkeley IT staff, I feel your pain. Some of your frustrations are out of our control because they are determined by campus-IT esoterica (telebears time assignment), and other frustrations a due to our departmental policies (e.g. inability to view qualitative feedback in teaching evaluations) and we hate that it decreases the value of the services that we provide for you. Your best bet is to communicate your frustrations to the administration to get real policy changes.
But before I pass the buck completely, some of your frustrations are things we may be able to do something about. In the case of the class schedule application, we are actively working on that application to make it better- we recently added the ability to sort on the "Course" and "Title" columns, and last semester we added "advanced search" functionality based mostly on feedback from the registrar.
We'll look into improving the time-search functionality and providing some enrollment visualization. Time search is often nontrivial with our classes, which, in some odd cases, have something like one meeting on Mondays from 10:35-11:55am, and another meeting Wednesday evening from 6:20-8:05pm.
At any rate, when you have specific issues like this, please, let us hear about it.
The best way to get in touch about website issues is via the "Feedback" link on the bottom of every www.law.b~.edu page. We do take that feedback into account when prioritizing projects and when we work with the functional owners of applications to make improvements. There are other reliable ways to provide feedback, but blog comments aren't one of them, mostly because we can't guarantee that we will see them, but also because we can't close the feedback loop or ask for clarification if needed.
Cheers
For what it's worth, I just submitted some choice feedback of my own. I encourage the rest of you to do the same.
BHSA, you are a fraud. Why are you doing this survey? Which administrator asked you pretty please? You are aware that the evaluations do NOTHING to benefit the student body, aren't you? You are aware that the degree to which you are using resources that could be benefiting students, (which is arguably minimal based on historical precedent) you are wasting those resources, aren't you? You are aware that in the aggregate you do more to harm the student body than you do to help it, aren't you? In case you need a re-cap, Patrick is right and the evaluation process is a sham. To the degree that BHSA (the "s" is for "STUDENTS" FYI) is being used as a pawn to elicit further evaluation responses from students, without getting anything for us in return, BHSA is a sham too, and as far as I am concerned the way you wrote your survey proves it. Questions about whether to allot the first ten minutes of the last ten minutes for survey time, or whether to use paper versions go to the heart of the issue? Give me a fucking break. The issue is not the format of the survey or the medium on which it is delivered. Students not a bunch of sheep who regurgitate lengthy evaluations whenever the right visual/temporal cues appear. The answer is simple. Make the responses available to the student body. When the admin at the school says no an cites some reason or other grow a spine and put your foot down. You all want to be lawyers for fuck's sake. Step one is to remember who your clients are.
Maybe BHSA does recognize its client. Maybe it's the name of the organization that is the problem.
4:45 - BHSA is made up of volunteers and your classmates. any minute of time they spend on BHSA is one minute more than you are "entitled" to.
It sounds to me like you need to run for BHSA. otherwise, kindly cut your whining.
TJ - that's a very juvenile argument. Are you not allowed to criticize the presidential candidates unless you've run for president?
And don't give me this "volunteer" argument. People run for BHSA because they get something out of it - the ability to make a difference, resume boost, connections, enjoyment, etc. That's not to say that we're not grateful for what they do, or that they don't do it out of the goodness of their heart. But it also doesn't give them the right to do a shitty job.
I'm with TJ on this. As someone who knows what a lot of BHSA members pile onto their schedules on top of the rigors of keeping up in class, they do a hell of a job.
As for you 4:45 and 6:49, all I have to say is this: put up or shut up. Seriously. And 4:45, don't ever post as "Dean Edley" again. Very unclassy.
Hmm...looks like the anonymous emailer is a transfer student from UCLA...
That linked ATL article is plenty funny, but only to the extent it makes BU students look like complete douchebags.
Matt-
This guy- http://www.blogger.com/profile/6867154
Very unclassy?
I don't think BHSA (or any official Boalt organization, for that matter) will ever be able to adequately solve the course evaluation problems. The school has a vested interest in protecting its faculty from the scrutiny of its students.
This is something an outside organization must do -- an organization more outside than Nuts and Boalts, even. The whole "don't mention prof names in a Google-searchable way" rule is just ridiculous. Do people really think a bad review on a student blog will have any tangible effect on a professor's career? It's par for the course.
To clear something up, I'm the e-mailer. I meant those thoughts for Patrick, but he asked if he could post, I said yes, now it's driving me nuts to have my thoughts appear unattributed. So there, it's off my chest. Plus you guys suck...the UCLA thing didn't give it away? Really? It's like identical to what I said over 3 years ago in the post Patrick linked to. Yeesh. Ok, moving on...
If 4:08 is who I think he is, then he's been doing a great job of paying attention to the Boalties' wants and needs with respect to IT. I hurled profanities at Berkeley IT for a reason. So, keep up the good work, and I understand main campus is effectively stuck in 1989 in its IT capabilities.
11:25, the farther out you go, the less Boaltie interest (see, e.g., Matt's blog). The closer you get, the greater control exhibited by professors. I hate to harp UCLA UCLA UCLA (though I did that a lot in the amazing win over the hated Cardinal), but I still think the UCLA solution is the best one. Independent of course evals, the student gov funded a website where students could go and rate professors on a number matrices. They could also leave comments. But to access the site, you need the equivalent of a CalID pw. This kept the professors happy by not revealing their horrible classroom manners to their professional colleagues at Columbia, and kept the students happy by providing meaningful information to weigh your options. To the extent BHSA is trying to set something like that up, that would be my suggestion: (a) cooperate with main campus/boalt re authentication (b) retain autonomy over content, e.g., no overlap with course evals.
Matt & TJ - I want you to remember to "put up or shut up" next time you complain about someone with the power to make a difference.
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