Word: surveys
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...Harvard College Curricular Review, when the entirety of the undergraduate experience is under the microscope, an overhauled CUE Guide can be an invaluable tool to evaluate everything from the proposed portal courses to any improvement in undergraduate advising. The CUE should combine the flexibility of a web-based survey with new, more probing questions and an expanded grading scale to achieve the survey’s true potential...
...survey should also seek to evaluate the teaching quality of professors and teaching fellows more precisely. As it stands, the CUE Guide prints comments concerning instructors’ teaching abilities that are sometimes trivial. For example, the fact that a professor speaks too softly in lecture does not carry nearly as much import as whether or not students are actually mastering the course material. The rewritten survey should allow students to specifically identify their instructors’ pedagogical shortcomings; the oft-repeated comment that a “professor is disorganized,” for instance, is too general...
...evaluative criteria in the survey should assess the expense of materials required to take a course. As we have repeatedly commented, the costs for textbooks, course packs, and sourcebooks are more outrageous than ever, for a variety of reasons. It’s only fair that students should be allowed to voice their discontent over high costs associated with particularly pricey courses. This evaluation would alert teaching staffs who might not otherwise be aware of the problem that their course materials were unpalatably expensive...
Amidst all of these recommendations, however, a caveat must be mentioned. The points during the year at which the online CUE surveys are administered are extremely stressful for students. Accordingly, students should not be expected to complete a survey that is any longer than the current version. Rather than lengthening the current survey, the CUE should focus on eliminating the survey’s unnecessary portions. Undergraduates and teaching staffs both want data concerning two important areas: course difficulty and teaching quality. Therefore, questions that don’t explicitly supply data relating to either of these two areas should...
...survey of student political groups suggests that the barrier of student apathy has yet to be breached this year. While some undergraduates make an effort to involve themselves in Cambridge affairs, the majority of students—even those who consider themselves politically active—have little interest in the political terrain of their home away from home...