Course-evaluation system now fully online

It's time for students to tell professors how they really feel about them - and now they can do it online.

The Provost's Office has shifted the entire Penn course evaluation system online, and all students will have to either complete or opt out of the evaluations by May 15 in order to receive their final grades.

"The decision to go online was made last summer," Rob Nelson, the director of undergraduate education, said, "and the faculty-student committee received policy questions last fall."

Nelson explained that there were several reasons for the change, but the three "official" reasons were that this system would be less expensive, more environmentally friendly and more efficient.

Because the course evaluations directly feed the popular Penn Course Review system, going online was an easier way to go about the process, College senior and committee member Aaron Werner said.

Like in most of the Provost's Office initiatives, students were a driving force in this digitization process, through both the faculty-student committee and the partnership with the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education.

Last fall, the faculty-student committee met three times over the course of five to six weeks to discuss the various aspects of how the new system would be implemented, Werner explained.

SCUE's online initiative working group partnered with the Provost's Office as a way to get student perspective, SCUE chairwoman and College junior Alex Berger said. The group's main focus was on the Penn Course Review, which "completely depends on the success of the course evaluations," Berger said.

In addition to more organized numerical ratings, the qualitative reports that come from the comment section of the evaluation were important points of interest as well.

Berger said, SCUE was looking to have "synthesized, Zagat-style comments" to accompany the numbers that make up a regular part of Penn Course Review results.

The organization currently has an editorial board, led by College sophomore Lauren Springer. The group will sort through all course-related comments and organize the most commonly expressed sentiments into a paragraph giving a general overview of the class and the professor.

This overseer group will ensure that the qualitative section will not be a "free for all" to just post comments on the site, Berger explained.

Though there were concerns about a lack of response, Nelson assured that he actually expects to get more responses this year, especially because they will be able to catch any students that would normally miss the evaluation day.

Werner added that the routine of filling out evaluations in addition to the grade incentive should be enough to incite responses.

"I'm confident that students will respond in high numbers," he said.

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