A New Cue

The CUE Guide serves as an indispensable tool for Harvard students during the course selection process, but the Guide’s influence extends far beyond the undergraduate population. Administrators, professors, and Teaching Fellows all look to the Committee on Undergraduate Education’s (CUE) annual publication for evaluation of the success of a course’s curriculum and pedagogy. Accordingly, this semester the CUE is studying how it might make what is currently a student-oriented volume more informative to instructors as well. Given the insufficiency of the current CUE Guide format to satisfy the needs of all those involved in undergraduate education, the CUE should continue in its plans to rewrite its evaluative course survey in a manner that will yield helpful information to teachers as well as students.

Most importantly, the gradation scale of the current survey should be expanded to allow students to assess more specifically the quality of their courses. The current scale of one to five does not meet this end, since most students never give scores of less than three, especially to instructors. Expanding the present scale to a range of one to seven would allow students to provide more detail in their evaluations, which in turn would provide the teaching staffs with the helpful information that they’re looking for.

The new survey should also seek to evaluate the teaching quality of professors and teaching fellows more precisely. As it stands, the CUE Guide prints comments concerning instructors’ teaching abilities that are sometimes trivial. For example, the fact that a professor speaks too softly in lecture does not carry nearly as much import as whether or not students are actually mastering the course material. The rewritten survey should allow students to specifically identify their instructors’ pedagogical shortcomings; the oft-repeated comment that a “professor is disorganized,” for instance, is too general to be of any real use to instructors if it’s not accompanied by particular areas in the course that require more attention.

One of the new evaluative criteria in the survey should assess the expense of materials required to take a course. As we have repeatedly commented, the costs for textbooks, course packs, and sourcebooks are more outrageous than ever, for a variety of reasons. It’s only fair that students should be allowed to voice their discontent over high costs associated with particularly pricey courses. This evaluation would alert teaching staffs who might not otherwise be aware of the problem that their course materials were unpalatably expensive.

Amidst all of these recommendations, however, a caveat must be mentioned. The points during the year at which the online CUE surveys are administered are extremely stressful for students. Accordingly, students should not be expected to complete a survey that is any longer than the current version. Rather than lengthening the current survey, the CUE should focus on eliminating the survey’s unnecessary portions. Undergraduates and teaching staffs both want data concerning two important areas: course difficulty and teaching quality. Therefore, questions that don’t explicitly supply data relating to either of these two areas should be scrapped. Assessing the efficacy of a course website, for example, is not a critical exercise compared to assessing pedagogy. In this way, the CUE can keep its surveys short, ensuring a high response rate and a great diversity of students taking the surveys.

In the midst of the Harvard College Curricular Review, when the entirety of the undergraduate experience is under the microscope, an overhauled CUE Guide can be an invaluable tool to evaluate everything from the proposed portal courses to any improvement in undergraduate advising. The CUE should combine the flexibility of a web-based survey with new, more probing questions and an expanded grading scale to achieve the survey’s true potential.