Student activist pushes for public course evaluations

Author: Austin Davis

Molley Kaiyoorawongs '09, who has recently spearheaded a campaign to decrease student apathy concerning dining hall management, is expanding her crusade to include advocating a change to the administration's course evaluation policies. The ubiquitous posters covering campus state her goal frankly: "What if students could read end-of-semester professor and course evaluations?"

Kaiyoorawongs is no stranger to challenging norms at the College - as part of her senior year explosion of activism on campus, she currently coordinates a campaign designed to stop the dining halls' loss of dishes by working from the bottom up and challenging students at their level. Her newest project, however, provides for far more disagreement and debate.

Assisted by Yan Min Choo '09 and a small corps of volunteers, Kaiyoorawongs has devised a three-step plan to publicize the debate over faculty evaluations. First, to get the question into the minds of community members, her campaign is plastering the campus with flyers. After giving students time to mull it over, an informal survey of their opinions will occur through their mail boxes, in their e-mail accounts or at the dining halls. If students show an overwhelming lack of interest in making course evaluations public, the campaign stops there. If they do show an interest, then Kaiyoorawongs plans to approach everyone with institutional power about the results. If the faculty and administration begin a dialogue with students about this issue, Kaiyoorawongs will judge her campaign a success.

Kaiyoorawongs believes that some additional form of public transparency is necessary to improve the quality of the teaching at Middlebury. Prefacing her motivations with the disclaimer that "the majority of my professors here at Middlebury have been phenomenal," she believes that the current perceived lack of accountability tenured professors have to the responses of student evaluations is unacceptable. Professors' tenure is reviewed only once every ten years, and student evaluations count for only about one-third of the process. If student evaluations were made public, Kaiyoorawongs believes that professors would have a greater incentive to maintain the quality of their classes in order to maintain enrollment numbers.

On the other hand, Choo focuses on the particular benefits public evaluations would have for students trying to pick classes. Students searching for the classes that best fit them often turn to www.MiddKid.com for its teacher evaluations, but "MiddKid has a number of drawbacks," he says. Primarily, it lacks the legitimacy a school-sanctioned project would have because it does not draw comprehensive pictures of the professors it reviews. Choo doesn't want to use public student evaluations as a way to penalize professors, but instead, as a means of assisting students in choosing classes.

The faculty, however, is expected to resist efforts to make course evaluations public. Professor Paul Nelson, a long-standing member of the Political Science department and a six-year veteran of the Evaluation Committee, felt uneasy about making course evaluations public.

"There is something confidential and local about a course evaluation, an agreement between student and professor, student and course," he said.

While he is not against an alternative system for students to offer more comprehensive advice for their peers in deciding their classes, Nelson believes that "the local dimension of evaluations" would be lost if they were made publicly available.

Kaiyoorawongs and Choo say they are trying to get students "just to say, 'hey, why are things the way they are?' We should question them and what people do. After that, it's up to them."