NU Students lobbying to require professors to post their CTECs online won a small victory last week, when Northwestern’s CTEC Advisory Committee approved a proposal that would force professors to make all evaluations available.
The legislation will now go to the University Provost’s office, which will decide whether or not the proposal should be enacted.
Current policies allow professors to block students from viewing CTEC evaluations of their classes. Associated Student Government wants to eliminate that option.
Mandating professors to post their CTECs online would be the second major change in the system since fall 2004, when the university denied CTEC access to students who didn’t fill out evaluations in the previous quarter. That move sparked a 45 percent jump in the number of students filling out the forms.
“Given that we’re paying a very high tuition, we deserve all the information that we can get,” said David Spett, a Medill sophomore and student representative on the CTEC committee. “I think we deserve to know what our fellow students think about the classes that they’ve taken. I don’t think there’s any reason or any right for people to take away information about past courses.”
In a closed-door meeting held Friday, the advisory committee approved legislation recommending “all CTECs be made available online for viewing by students who have filled out their CTECs for the previous term.”
According to ASG Academic Vice President and Weinberg senior Jason Downs, the Provost’s office might take one of two courses of action: It could mandate the legislation for the entire university or it could ask each school to vote on it.
“If it goes to the individual schools, ASG and I will take it from there,” Downs said. “We’ll approach each school and tell them why we think this is a good idea.”
Professors must choose whether to hide their CTECs before they read them. Department chairmen and school deans review the evaluations, even if professors decide to conceal the information from students. These reports help department leaders to make decisions about promotions and tenure of professors.
The CTEC program began in 1977, when the Office of the Registrar started publishing an annual anthology of class reviews. Faculty agreed to the program under the condition that they could choose not to participate in it, said Nedra Hardy, director of the CTEC program.
Between 5 and 7 percent of professors opt to suppress their CTECS, Hardy said. Their reasons vary. Some who have “failed miserably” with an experimental teaching technique prefer not to have the results broadcast online, Hardy said.
More often, departments that assign instructors to students, such as foreign language departments, ask not to post their teachers’ ratings. Some professors also prefer to keep the happenings of their class private.
The small group of professors that has these concerns might be able to successfully resist the effort, Hardy said.
“Probably the majority of the faculty would say fine, I have mine posted all the time anyway,” Hardy said. “But those who feel strongly about not having them posted might create enough disturbance that the other faculty members might say ‘Right, you should have that opportunity’ and stand up for them.”
The university needs to carefully consider the merits of the original CTEC agreement, said Scott Lipscomb, a music professor and advisory committee member. Faculty agreed to the program under the condition that it be optional, he said. Whether the university should go back on that compromise is still being debated.
“Ultimately,” he said, “that’s the decision that has to be made at this point to go forward.”
Reach Jordan Weissmann at [email protected].
