CUE Guide Might Drop Its Print Edition

The Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) unanimously approved a short new CUE evaluation form this Friday and discussed the possibility of moving both the CUE Guide and the Courses of Instruction catalog online in the near future. Members of the committee also expressed support for an Undergraduate Council (UC) effort to improve the Quad Library and expressed alarm at the high prices of coursepacks, which they said might be avoidable.

Members of the committee said that they were satisfied with the CUE evaluation process during the fall semester. The number of course evaluations submitted was higher than last spring, when the online evaluation form debuted.

Yet, the percentage of students who submitted a CUE evaluation, 84, remains well below Yale’s, which is in the mid-90s. Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 wrote in an e-mail that Yale gets a higher response rate because their evaluations are a part of their culture, as they are becoming at Harvard, and because Yale withholds final examination grades if students do not submit evaluations. Harvard, he said, should not need to do that. “Harvard should be able to beat Yale on school spirit alone!” he wrote.

Judith L. Ryan, the Weary professor of German and comparative literature, said that while a significant number of her colleagues have been unhappy with the lower online response rates compared to the old paper version, she thinks that the system is working well. “I particularly like the idea that you’re not going to spend class time on [the evaluations],” she said.

The committee discussed two ways to improve response rates. One possibility is to extend the CUE evaluation process through final examinations.

“Whether or not a final exam tests the substance of the semester, whether it accurately reflects course material,” UC Vice Chair of Student Affairs Committee Matthew R. Greenfield ’08 said, “are important questions.”

Members of the committee also said that they hope the CUE evaluation form that they approved on Friday will generate more responses.

The new form, which will soon be submitted to the Faculty Council, is very similar to the old evaluation, but is reorganized and slightly shorter.

While it is the product of months of work by the CUE and the pedagogy committee of the curricular review, the revised form includes few entirely new questions.

In another change, Gross wrote that he expects that this will be the last year that the CUE Guide is printed. “The electronic format is more flexible,” he wrote.

Greenfield, however, cautioned that an online CUE tool must be a major improvement over the printed guide to warrant a complete transition. “If you could go online and search for a class that has over a 4.0 in the CUE Guide and meets certain days of the week and is in a certain department,” he said, “it would probably render the book obsolete.”

Greenfield was similarly hesitant about a proposal to make the Courses of Instruction catalog available exclusively online, with copies printed only for the University archives. “If the alternative is the same material, just printed on a website,” he said, “then we might as well just keep going as we are.”

Study card signatures, too, may be shifted online. Gross wrote that faculty members may be able to sign study cards electronically in the fall, though advisers will likely continue to sign study cards by hand. “This will save students the trouble of printing new study cards and getting new signatures each time that they change a course,” he wrote.

The committee also addressed a UC report on conditions in the Quad Library. Limited hours, an outdated reserves collection, and a variety of building problems mean that the library is an inadequate study space for Quad residents, according to members of the UC.

Though the Quad recently added Saturday hours this fall and increased its coursepack reserves, complaints persist about both issues. The Quad Library is only open until 1 a.m. from Monday to Wednesday, and closes at 10 p.m. on Thursday night.

The Quad Library does not have the funding to purchase new reserves, so students can only study with materials that have been used by courses in previous semesters. Additionally, the library only carries coursepacks from the most popular Harvard courses. According to Greenfield, water pools at the front door in bad weather, and the ventilation system is very loud when it is hot.

Ryan said that the University’s Quad Library policy is “terribly short-sighted” and hypocritical. “How can we be saying with one side of our mouth that we care about the undergraduate experience and be saying out of the other side of our mouth that there are other people out in the Quad that we don’t care about?” she asked.

At the moment, very few students use the library, Librarian of the Lamont Library Heather E. Cole said. In hourly counts conducted since October, the average number of people in the Quad Library was only 13.9, while the highest number counted was 54, Cole said.

Members of the UC acknowledged that these figures were low and could raise questions about devoting funds to the library, but attributed them to the poor conditions, which they said force Quad residents to make the long trek to Lamont.

Some members of the committee offered to draft a resolution supporting the UC’s effort to improve the Quad Library.

Greenfield said that a bill about the library will likely appear before the UC this week, and predicted that the movement to improve the library will gain momentum.

The committee also discussed the increasingly high prices of coursepacks and sourcebooks, which are the result of high copyright fees demanded by publishers.

Some members of the committee suggested that many of these fees could be avoided if faculty members checked their reading lists with Harvard’s electronic resources, which the University has already paid for. These materials may be accessed by students electronically for free.

Ryan said that it can be difficult for faculty members to keep pace with the rapidly advancing field of digital resources, and suggested that the Core office and department heads remind faculty members to check Harvard’s resources before copyright fees are paid.

Greenfield said that if indeed the high prices of coursepacks are largely avoidable, forcing students to pay the copyright fee twice is “almost fraudulent” and “entirely unreasonable.” But, he added, “cheaper coursepacks may be far more realistic than anyone has been thinking they were, and that’s exciting.”

—Staff writer Alex M. McLeese can be reached at amcleese@fas.harvard.edu.