When the Arts and Sciences Council votes later this semester on whether to continue providing course evaluation information online, the proposal it considers will be weaker than last year's plan, but still may have a difficult time gaining faculty approval.
Reacting to what he calls near-certain faculty opposition to permanently approving the current version of the Student Accessible Course Evaluation System, Arts and Sciences Council Chair Ronald Witt hopes to present a compromise plan allowing professors to post their evaluation data. The current trial system, approved narrowly last year, placed all evaluation data online unless faculty members specifically requested that it not be posted.
"I don't see any other way," Witt said. "If we go for the whole hog, there will be nothing to eat."
The executive committee of the Arts and Sciences must approve Witt's proposal before the entire council considers it, most likely at its December meeting.
The vote will not affect SACES availability this semester-course evaluation data has already been posted for spring registration. During its trial period last spring, students accessed the information about 18,000 times, said Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College.
If Witt's plan succeeds, it would change SACES from an opt-out to an opt-in system for faculty. Although it remains unclear what affect the change would have on how much data is available online, Witt predicted that over time, the success of faculty members who share their evaluation data online will encourage more faculty to follow suit.
Chemistry professor James Bonk said he thought the compromise might be the most appropriate choice. "There's the usual danger of one-size-fits-all," Bonk said. "And maybe one size doesn't fit all in this case."
Online course evaluations lose some of their value if professors have to actively request to post information, said Alan Biermann, professor and chair of computer science.
"I want that freshman student who feels insignificant who took course XYZ to have a chance to express [himself], and I want the other student who feels insignificant who might take that course to hear what the first student said," Biermann said.
Course evaluations--and specifically whether to publicize the results online--have had a rollercoaster history with the council. In 1998, the council approved the first online evaluation system--Duke Undergraduates Evaluate Teaching--to replace the Teacher Course Evaluation Book, which many students complained was incomplete. DUET, however, was discontinued in September 1999, after faculty members expressed concerned with negative student comments.
Duke Student Government took up the project again that fall and proposed a system called Views and Online Information through Course Evaluations later that year. In May 2000, however, VOICE met with the council's rejection.
By May 2001, Thompson and DSG developed SACES and replaced the old "green sheets" with machine-readable evaluation forms. The council approved the evaluation system and granted a trial run for putting the results online. It extended the trial last January, on the condition that the council's permanent vote on SACES would come this fall.
Robert Wolpert, professor of statistics and decision sciences, spoke against the system last year, and said that the evaluation itself, not its online availability, concerned him. He said he would like the evaluations to target the intellectual stimulation of classes.
"I'm happy to have evaluations online, but I don't think the current instruments give evaluation--they give popularity," Wolpert said.
In evaluating classes during the past year, students' choices most strongly correlated a course's overall quality with its intellectual stimulation, not the perception of the course's difficulty or amount of work, Thompson said. "That's what happens when students fill these out, and I expect that is what they do when they choose courses as well," he said.
Thompson maintained that the other indicators also had value. "Sometimes, if students have three very demanding courses, they may need one that is less demanding," he said.
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