Editorial: Ready, SET...go?

12/02/08 - Can you believe it? The end of the semester is right around the corner - six more days of classes, to be exact.With the fall semester coming to a close, instructors are doling out the number two pencils and passing out those sheets with the brown circles. Yes, the SETs.

The Student Evaluation of Teaching form that the University of Rhode Island has used for more than three decades has become, for many students, useless.

For our freshmen, the idea behind the SET is to gauge a professor's teaching ability from the student perspective.

However, with obvious questions like, "is material presented in the course relevant to the field?" these forms are not exactly the best measure.

First off, the answer key for the SET can easily be likened to that of a restaurant comment card. Students select their response by choosing the corresponding letter for satisfactory, unsatisfactory, average, etc.

Honestly, do administrators expect students to compare their academic courses to a main course at a cheesy chain restaurant? And how can they possibly interpret what qualifies as satisfactory?

"Satisfactory" to some students might mean, "well, the teacher didn't beat me, so I guess I was satisfied." While to others it means, "Wow, dude's a silver fox."

Where the current SET fails is in that it is not specific enough in identifying the instructor's shortcomings.

There's no space to write in individual comments, although some teachers, on occasion, provide separate evaluations they've created themselves - cheers to them for actually caring what their students think.

It's this lack of specificity that allows many students to rush through or blindly select the same answer for every question.

Also, what happens when students want to see the compiled data from themselves and their peers?

Don't try looking for it Online. Check the library rather. The results of the SETs are available on microfilm. Really, microfilm? You'd think this process would be a little more tech-savvy after more than 30 years.

It seems as if the only useful purpose these SETs serve, as quite a few students see it, is that the process of filling them out shaves a few minutes off of a dull lecture.

Last year new evaluations were introduced in some classes in hopes of gaining more student insight. Unfortunately, this year we're still seeing plenty of those tacky, vague forms. And after three decades of them, it's getting old.

Better luck with ratemyprofessor.com.