CUE To Try Online Forms

Students taking math, German and Freshman Seminars this semester will be able to forego paper CUE Guide evaluations and reflect upon their experiences online, the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) announced yesterday.

The implementation of online evaluations for these three subjects is part of a pilot program planned last semester by the CUE, which had its first meeting of the year yesterday.

The online forms will include the same questions as their paper counterparts and will be made available to students at the same time as the paper forms in the last week of class.

Aimed to free up classroom time for teaching, online forms could be issued for all classes if administrators find participation rates in the trial run satisfactory.

There are currently not any incentives in place to ensure students fill out the online forms. But Department Administrator for the Office for Academic Programs Deborah Green said yesterday that in the future, it may be possible to withhold individual grade reports until students fill out their forms.

Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 also discussed using my.harvard.edu to create study cards for students to print out and bring to their advisers for signatures, instead of having to fill them in by hand.

“We might go to total online course registration in a two-step process,” he said, explaining that the next phase would allow students to submit their cards electronically without printing them out.

But Gross added that the fate of such an online registration system will depend on what the curricular review decides about course-selection advising.

The CUE also discussed professor and teaching fellow training and ways for students to provide feedback to their instructors earlier in the semester.

Possibilities included providing an online forum for students to comment anonymously on their classes and encouraging more students to approach their professors with questions and comments.

“[These things] can lead to really lively and stimulating debate,” said CUE member John Stauffer, professor of English and American Literature and Language.

Danny F. Yagan ’06 suggested that another way to encourage student-faculty exchange would be for professors to give students questions to consider specifically for discussion in office hours.

Associate Dean of Harvard College Elizabeth Doherty also suggested some reasons that certain groups of freshman have not chosen to apply to freshman seminars in the past.

Students taking full-year course sequences in subjects like chemistry and other smaller classes tend not to apply to freshman seminars, she said. Additionally, because seminars do not meet in the afternoon, students with heavy athletic commitments do not tend to apply either.

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.