Class Evaluation System Should Be Moved Online

Course evaluation season is upon us. Some universities share results from course evaluations with their students who use them to make better informed decisions when selecting classes. Why doesn't UC Berkeley? Students at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia fill out their course evaluations online. These universities save literally tons of paper and avoid countless hours of work processing, transcribing and storing the evaluations. Clearly these universities are saving trees as well as money. Isn't UC Berkeley an environmental leader? With a $60 million budget shortfall to address, shouldn't we be enacting all possible cost-saving measures? Stanford has achieved an increased response rate by moving their evaluations online. They are able to better process and analyze their data. An additional benefit is the ability to easily customize questions asked by college, department and even course. Students provide a free service to their university by filling out course evaluations. They are then used for faculty tenure and promotion cases. In fact, students pay to fill out these evaluations in the form of tuition. Evaluations are performed in class, replacing classroom instruction for which students have paid.

The student body pays dearly for the evaluations-hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although the 15 minutes of lost class time required to evaluate one class is no big deal, 20,000 students who take four classes lose approximately one hour of class time per semester. Multiplied by eight semesters, the number immediately balloons into thousands of hours of lost instruction time for which students have paid. What do students get in return? A precedent has already been set on campus for the sharing of course evaluations. The students in the EECS department see summary statistics from course evaluations online through a student group, Eta Kappa Nu, an engineering honor society. Their Web site allows students to search by course and instructor. The statistics are available to students to help them select their courses. All departments should follow the precedent of sharing results from evaluations.

Legally, the University of California is subject to the California Public Records Act, which proclaims access to state records as a fundamental and necessary right of every person in this state. The University of California, a state institution, should comply with state law by making access to course evaluations available. On each evaluation, students should write the comment "Please share course evaluation results with students." Hopefully the administration will take steps towards this end and no more drastic actions will be required. We are lagging behind its peer institutions. Students perform the evaluations so the results belong to them. We should reclaim environmental leadership by conducting evaluations online. It is time for UC Berkeley to stop swindling the students of classroom instruction time for which they have paid, and to reward students for filling out evaluations by sharing summary statistics with them. If our peer universities can do it, why can't UC Berkeley?