TAYLOR DUNN: We are officially one week past the point in the term when one can drop a course without any consequences. That was also the point where we should have had an official route for giving feedback to professors.
Yale encourages students to give feedback to their professors after the course is over via an anonymous online form. The form asks questions such as “How would you summarize this course for a fellow student?” and “Overall, how would you rate the workload of this course in comparison to other Yale courses you have taken?” and “Would you recommend Economics 116 01 to another student? Why or why not?” These questions are aimed at helping other students decide whether they want to take the course in the future. But this doesn’t always help professors improve their teaching.
The problem with giving feedback after the end of the course is since students are unlikely to have more contact with the professor unless they liked the course, they have no incentive to be productive, constructive, and specific in their critiques. In turn, there’s no pressure for professors to respond to students’ suggestions.
Under the current system, students feel comfortable being incredibly harsh.
One professor I spoke with said some of her students made sweeping generalizations that she had difficulty reconciling with the course she thought she taught. She mentioned that some of her criticism had felt so harsh and so ungrounded one year, that she has rarely read any of her feedback since. This makes the process entirely counterproductive.
Further, it’s true that many professors will want to improve their course for next year so as to get more students. But if the course is a large course that no professor seems to want to teach and many students are obliged to take, as many of the introductory courses are, there is no real reason a professor has to change. But it would be hard for professors not to pay attention to students’ suggestions if they knew they’d be standing in front of those same students again in the lecture hall the following week.
Perhaps most importantly, allowing students to give professors feedback at midterm would help make students more aware of their learning experience, of what they want to learn, and of how they best learn. Such an awareness is crucial if students are to continue to learn after they leave Yale.
Recklessly Curious 