Every fall, I try to perform my civic duty by dedicating one column to outlining some service the University of Wisconsin should provide for its students but doesn’t. These are not outlandish proposals; they are services that many comparable schools offer their students, services like low-cost semester textbook rentals and upperclass housing suites through UW Housing.
But the administration and budget bureau turned a deaf ear to those proposals (can you imagine that?), so I have altered my approach this year. Instead of making an appeal to the administration for some new program, this one is aimed at students themselves.
The Objective
Registration time is coming upon us already, and the new timetable is out on the Web. Everyone will soon be digging through it, marking down the courses they have to take, trying to satisfy requirements and, if they’re lucky enough to have a spot or two left over, trying to find an elective that looks like fun.
And they will be asking around. They’ll be asking their friends, their classmates, their advisors, people they hardly even know. Have you taken a class with this professor? How is she? Is the reading that bad? Is she a grade Nazi?
These conversations will go on for a few weeks before registration is over, and the intelligence-gatherers will find a handful of opinions on a certain professor at best. At worst, they will register for the class blindly, opening themselves up for the semester from hell with Professor Monotone McFlunkyou and his syllabus of pain.
Either way, these random opinion polls are not exactly scientific, and UW still gets away with keeping those who couldn’t teach to save their lives at the podium. This is where my proposal comes in.
The Proposal
We need to form an organization of paid student employees to create a comprehensive professor/course-evaluation guide for students each year through ASM.
I’m not talking about just printing up what ASM already provides on its website — the average overall course-evaluation numbers for about half the departments at UW every other semester. I am talking about an actual guide, done through independent surveys and data-gathering, with summaries of comments about each professor in each course every year regarding lecture style, accessibility, course content, workload and the approximate cost of course materials.
Such a utopia of relevant student information is not out of reach. All it would take is a group of motivated students who can write, maybe a joint student-faculty committee and some university funds. It can be done. It already has been done elsewhere.
What’s more, it morally should be done. Students pay an awful lot to take classes at UW; this investment should not be “buyer beware.” No one should have to bust their ass mowing lawns, waiting tables and begging his or her parents for money for the “privilege” of having Professor McFlunkyou slowly lull him or her to sleep three times a week.
These professors’ verbal torture would be fully exposed in such a guide, as well it should be. This university spends a lot of money to focus upon research, particularly with its Madison Initiative plan, and teaching quality often gets lost in the process.
The guide acts as a check: Department heads could no longer look the other way when they have great academic minds who teach like they’re on another planet, because their lecture halls would be empty. At the same time, professors would have even more motivation to give teaching their best effort; no one wants to look bad in print.
But we don’t have it yet, and registration is almost upon us. We must still only dream of a registration world that does not involve pressing sources for the lowdown on professors, of one where we are not left crossing our fingers come next semester.
It can happen. Until then, buyer beware.
Matt Lynch ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English and political science.
