SACET dissolved, removed from ballot

Katie Paul Guest Writer

The Vassar Student Association (VSA) voted at their meeting on Sunday, April 2, to remove the Student Advisory Committee on the Evaluation of Teaching (SACET) positions on the spring 2006 VSA elections ballot. VSA Academic Executive Rebecca Worthington ’06 said that SACET would cease to exist after this year, “because it’s not efficient and doesn’t serve its purpose.” SACET is a student task force that makes recommendations to Dean of the Faculty Ron Sharp about faculty reappointment, promotion, and tenure.

Worthington is currently working with Sharp and former VSA Academic Executive John Delap ’05 to brainstorm new ways to consider student opinions more fairly and efficiently in the faculty evaluation process.

SACET currently consists of elected students from each major division, including natural sciences, social sciences, arts and languages, independent/multidisciplinary, and undeclared. The group used to review course evaluations filled at the end of the semester by majors in each professor’s department. These evaluations were part of a three-part system.

Students still complete the Course Evaluation Questionnaire (CEQ) and open-ended response sheet, the latter of which is not considered in the faculty review process since only the professor has access to it.

While both the CEQ and open-end responses remain in use, SACET voted in the fall of 2002 to do away with the majors’ evaluation due to their flawed format and poor response rate.

Since then, SACET has not had any student feedback off of which to base their faculty review recommendations. According to Worthington, the group has therefore not made any recommendations since 2003, instead devoting its time to developing a form that students might instead use to evaluate their major and thesis advisors.

Worthington was critical of the resulting lack of student representation in the faculty review process. “Because it’s not a perfect system, it could be to the detriment of the professors, which has a direct bearing on their livelihoods,” said Worthington. She added that SACET decisions were based on secondary information, since in most cases SACET members had never been in class with the professors whose promotions they considered.

Worthington and Sharp are discussing other possibilities for student input in place of SACET.

According to one proposal, a faculty member up for tenure would be evaluated based on two student recommendations, one written by a student of the professor and the other written by a student of the department’s choice. Worthington said, however, that this was the territory of the Dean of the Faculty, not the VSA.

“We gave them our idea, and I would encourage whoever’s in my position next year to follow up on it,” said Worthington.