EDITORIAL: S.O.S.
Student Opinion Surveys in need of reconstruction
The semester's end is drawing near, and with it comes the inevitable Student Opinion Survey.
These surveys should be taken seriously by students and faculty. As students, we invest a lot in our education, and we deserve professors who will treat us with respect and give us the instruction we pay for. Faculty members deserve fair and honest evaluations free of bias or grudges.
Intended to a be a measuring tool for professor and course efficiency, the SOS form has become a routine, mundane and inaccurate evaluation tool in the Central Michigan University community. The forms are not effective in providing the holistic information needed to determine the success of a professor's teaching, but they are effective in having an influence on their careers.
For this reason especially, the forms are in need of a reconstruction.
Student opinion factors heavily into overall professor evaluation. College of Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences Dean Pamela Gates said positive SOS reviews can put a professor in her college in a better position for career advancement, while negative reviews can earn that person a talk with her.
While student opinion is important, it is not being gathered in a way that captures the effectiveness of the class itself. The questions are very focused on the professor, which allows for students to let things like ethnicity, accent and class size — things a professor cannot control — factor into their answers.
The question focus should be shifted away from the person and onto whether the student actually learned something throughout the course to better eliminate the chance for bias.
There are three short answer questions at the end of the survey that get closer to asking what students learned. However, students are often given the survey at the beginning or end of a class period and are expected to fill them rather quickly.
In 2012, the Student Government Association pushed to get SOS forms transferred online. This would allow for a greater number of more in-depth questions.
If the surveys cannot be put online, it would at least be helpful to give them to students outside of class, or to designate a longer amount of time to complete them. Rushed answers will not be accurate or well thought out.
Another way to improve the overall SOS process would to initiate smaller evaluations halfway through the semester. These would be an ideal way for professors to gauge how successful their teaching was before the end of the semester. This way, any issues could be addressed before the final opinion surveys, which earn them scores and factor heavily into their overall evaluations.
Right now, neither students nor faculty are getting what they deserve out of SOS forms. Any of these changes could make significant improvements to the way professors are evaluated and students are taught.
