The daily email harassment. The constant in-class reminders. Every DePaul student knows that as the quarter comes to an end, it’s that time again: course evaluations.

These surveys are one of the main ways the university receives feedback on its professors, and they play a critical role in the faculty promotion and tenure process. Although many may not take the time to fill them out, they provide an opportunity for students to influence what future classes may be offered and who might teach them.

According to David Miller, dean of the College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM), “(course evaluations) do give you a sense of the overall trends among faculty – are their numbers going up or down? (It) gives you some idea of what might be happening with a faculty member.”

A quarterly ritual, they provide valuable information to administrators and professors alike. Yet, the majority of colleges at DePaul do not make this data accessible online to students.

Noah Boggess, a sustainable urban development graduate student, said he hasn’t completed the evaluations but plans on filling them out.

“It’s more about providing feedback, not so much of the teachers but the programs for me.” He thinks that all evaluations should be made available online.

“I think it would be good to be transparent instead of going behind the curtain like that,” Boggess said.

An Academic Affairs survey conducted by the Student Government Association (SGA) last fall revealed that out of 161 respondents, 87 percent of the students said that they would “like the opportunity to view course evaluations” if they were public, while 82 percent said it would make them “more likely to complete evaluations” if they were made available online to the students.

Despite the high rate of students who support making evaluations available online, the faculty council roundly rejected the SGA-introduced proposal at its meeting on June 5. The council cited concerns that the evaluation “was a bad instrument,” while others felt that the main purpose of the evaluations was to provide feedback to faculty instead of provide information to students on courses or professors.

Currently, only two colleges at DePaul provide data from these student evaluations online: the College of Computing and Digital Media and the College of Law.

CDM Dean Miller thinks that making data from the evaluations available to the public is a good thing.

“I think students appreciate it. I do know by looking at our weblogs that those evaluations are consulted with some frequency, so obviously the students find it useful to look at those results.” Miller said.

Andrew Steward, a freshman in game design, said he thinks he will fill out evaluations. “It’s nice to give feedback.”

When asked about making the evaluations available online, Steward said that “he thinks it would be somewhat useful. “I guess it’d be the same as online sites like ratemyprofessors.com,” where students leave comments and rate professors and their classes.

Stephanie Barton, a freshman studying psychology, thinks evaluation data from DePaul would be more useful than other sites. “Ratemyprofessors.com (reviews) are either really good or bad – there is no in-between because either students are really angry or happy with their professors,” she said.

Barton says she took time to do the evaluations because “some professors were not the best so I wanted to give feedback on that.”

The College of Communication has “historically been in the position of having some of the highest responses across the university,” Lexa Murphy, associate dean for faculty development, said.

“We’ve actually been approached with that question in the last couple of years,” Murphy said when asked about posting evaluations online. Although students can go in person to the college office to request paper copies of evaluation data, “the faculty have voted against making them public online at this time.”

Even though evaluations play an important part in the tenure process, they are “just one piece of a large evaluation in terms of teaching,” according to Murphy. Other factors include in-class peer observations and a survey of students who had already completed the class.