VSA to initiate faculty evalutations

Danielle Laberge Guest Writer

The Vassar Student Association (VSA) Council passed the Professor Review Resolution to create a forum for faculty evaluation at its Feb. 25 meeting. The idea sprang from the former AskStudents database, which was dismantled by the administration over concerns of unfair grades and inappropriate comments.

In search of guidance, many students have been drawn to third-party databases such as ratemyprofessors.com, a site founded in 1999 that was aquired earlier this month by mtvU, MTV’s 24-hour college netowork. Despite the site’s popularity, however, some students have found it incomplete and difficult to use. “I couldn’t find most of my teachers,” said Sophie Laird ’10.

In the past few months, the Vassar Student Association (VSA) has scrutinized the quality and effectiveness of the Course Evaluation Questionnaire (CEQ), which is distributed to students at the end of every semester. The VSA Council also passed a resolution charging the new Committee on Professor Review (CPR) with the task of developing a new professor review database that will avoid the pitfalls of its predecessor on Feb. 25.

Though the student-run project is still in its early stages, some members of Council hope to enact the plan before fall pre-registration in 2007. According to Class of 2010 President Nate Silver, “Our duty is to respond to student concerns and to improve the overall experience of students on campus. A huge part of that is the academic experience, which will be better served if students have access to information on faculty as they sign up for classes.”

CPR seeks to strike a balance, creating a system that is effective and accurate while remaining fair and inoffensive to faculty members. The Committee is currently considering a variety of different ideas to ensure more balanced representation, including one that might make reviews available only after a certain number have been posted for a professor. Additionally, the system might allow a student to read reviews only after he or she has contributed his or her own reviews.

Regardless of whether or not the administration approves of the creation of such a database, VSA plans to go ahead with the project. CPR intends to ask for the support of the Dean of Faculty and Registrar in order to make the records more accurate. “This is a student service—run by and for students—and we hope that the administration will support us in this endeavor,” stated Silver. Dean of the Faculty Ronald Sharp and Dean of Studies Alexander Thompson III were unavailable for comment.

VSA President Abel McDonnell ’07 was pleased that the Academic Committee was working on the the system. “This issue has come up several times throughout the year, and was mentioned several times in the survey the [VSA] Executive Board sent out last semester,” said McDonnell.
McDonnell expressed a wish that the faculty will cooporate in this effort. “The Academic Committee hopes to engage the Dean of Faculty and Registrar to develop a system everyone can agree with,” he said. “AskStudents was taken offline because there were some very real concerns expressed by the faculty, but instead of addressing those concerns and fixing the service, the VSA simply took it offline.”

VSA Academic Executive Rachel Zoghlin ’07, who is the chair of the Academic Committee, hoped that students would use the system responsibly. “I think we ought to trust our fellow students to submit thoughtful and mature evaluations,” she said.