Word: cues
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Mandating course evaluations and their publication benefits students by improving professors’ teaching and by providing more information about a course before enrolling. But refusing CUE evaluations hurts teaching fellows (TFs) as well as their future students. The 60-odd professors’ rejection of CUE surveys left more than 230 TFs without the formal student evaluations that would help these aspiring academics develop their teaching careers. If Harvard is to expect, as we firmly believe it should, its tenure-track faculty to be as proficient in the classroom as they are in the library or the laboratory...
...mean time, there are a number of changes that should be made to the CUE evaluation process in order to further increase its efficacy. Recently, the College has made several improvements to the evaluations, such as moving to online forms in the spring of 2005 and adding some course-specific questions this fall. In addition, the current one-to-five numeric scale should be expanded to a seven-point system, since students’ hesitancy to grade below a “3” effectively shortens the scale to three points...
More importantly, the evaluations should ask for more extensive qualitative comments from students. The CUE Guide only publishes tabulations of numerical scores and of brief qualitative descriptions, which tends to flatten any interesting remarks into bland platitudes about a professor being “excellent” or “knowledgeable.” Publishing students’ thoughtful remarks online, as a list below the existing evaluation, would afford students a much better understanding of a course...
...these improvements will have little effect if students do not evaluate their courses. But students cannot give formal feedback if professors do not universally allow CUE evaluations. The College suffers from a culture where teaching ability plays essentially no role in hiring, where faculty, out of professional “courtesy” to their colleagues, are hesitant to evaluate each others’ courses, and where some instructors even refuse to hear students’ feedback on their own courses. If Harvard College wishes to remain the preeminent undergraduate institution, it must improve its undergraduate instruction. The first shortcoming?...
...flawed, however, and this trip proved no exception. My inability to learn about a whole country in one weekend was confirmed by my incessant jet lag. The choice of the comedian at the local comedy club to pick on me for a full three minutes was only slightly entertaining (cue to excessive blushing in reaction to American tourist clichés). And getting four golf balls off the ground out of about 200 at the driving range at University of Stirling wasn’t an experience I would call inspiring...