“This syllabus makes no sense.”
“Sorry, I can’t hang out tonight. Professor ____ loaded us up with way too much homework again.”
“The material in my biology class is ridiculously unclear.”
“I can’t even hear anything that Professor _____ says! He speaks so quietly!”
“I wish somebody had warned me about this professor…”
It must be really frustrating having to hold these kind of thoughts in…I mean, don’t you wish you had somewhere to air your complaints? Somewhere to thoroughly evaluate all your classes? Somewhere where people will actually listen and make tangible changes to improve our school?
Oh. Wait. What’s that? You do? YOU DO!
If you’re a QC student, it’s that time of year again to fill out your course evaluations. (And no, I’m not being paid to write this.)
You’ve probably received email reminders about filling these out, but have you ever stopped and considered how it can actually benefit you and the school to do so?
Course evaluations allow you to anonymously berate (or praise) your professors and classes. So basically, the evaluations are your direct complaint line to the school. People apparently really read these things (I know, I was shocked too) and make changes year to year…so it’s crucial that as many students as possible fill them out.
We all sit around and complain about professors, yet not many students actually take the 5 minutes to write out these complaints in a place where they’ll be acknowledged.
Every evaluation is anonymous unless you specify otherwise. And whether it’s a positive or negative evaluation, it’s read and taken into account. They are either used to help administration weed out the faculty members that are lagging or to acknowledge which faculty members and methods are helpful in providing you with a valuable education. Evaluations can also help a professor adjust their teaching style to better suit students. Whichever way you slice it, by filling out your evaluations, you are letting the school know how to create change.
So I guess you could say it’s an internal form of activism.
And even if you don’t care about creating change or whatnot, there are personal benefits too. All the evaluations are stored on courses.qc.cuny.edu so when you want to look up possible professors for future classes, you can get a detailed report on the pros and cons of each faculty member. But the system only works if we fill out the evaluations.
I mean, filling out these evaluations only takes a few minutes and only seems to have upsides, guys…
If you’re a QC student, you can go to www.qc.cuny.edu/evaluate (log in with same username and password that you use to get on the wifi…and we all know you remember that one) and fill out your evaluations. The deadline is May 17th at 11:59, but the sooner you can fill them out, the better!
If you have any questions/comments/thoughts about course evaluations or just want to share your enthusiasm upon completing them, feel free to post in the comments below!
