By Lauren del ValleNEWS EDITOR
Another registration period has passed. Waiting for 10:00 p.m. to strike on their assigned Sunday evening, students scrambled to advisement appointments, listened to peer hearsay and put faith in RateMyProfessor.com in an effort to devise the perfect fall 2015 schedule.
The Provost’s Office is collaborating with the Information Technology (IT) Department to offer students access to all Course Teacher Ratings (CTR) via a user-friendly interface within the My Hofstra portal. The new application will “fill in the blanks,” according to Terri Shapiro, associate provost for Accreditation and Outcomes Assessment.
Students anonymously complete evaluations of their course experiences through CTR’s at the end of each semester. Most students, however, don’t know where their evaluations go beyond their submission through the mail slot of an office door on the fourth floor of Axinn library.
CTR reports for fall and spring courses from 2004 through 2012 are currently housed on the My Hofstra portal in dense PDF files divided by year that each exceed 2000 pages. There is no table of contents nor search function. Each course report shows the question and the percentage of what answer each student responded on the scale one through five. The portion of the CTR offered for additional open-response commentary is not included.
Shapiro took over the project as Liora Schmelkin stepped down from the Provost’s Office in September and has conducted meetings with the IT Department to plan the initiative.
“According to IT, I don’t think they’ll have anything ready until the fall. But if anyone wants to request some information they can call me or my office and we’ll be happy to extract from our files whatever any student or faculty needs. We’ll work with you in any way we can.”
Brian Ferris, the web and mobile development manager, confirmed that the IT department will build the project over the summer to ensure its preparedness for the spring 2015 registration period in October. The interface will be available to students via mobile application as well, according to Ferris. The project requires no additional funding.
With outdated information in PDF files that students are largely unaware of and fall 2015 registration having now passed, it’s a wonder why this project was not completed sooner.
“It’s building a new system, [it] takes some times and we had some changes in personnel,” said Shapiro.
Currently, students turn to RateMyProfessor.com, a forum students from across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom rate and discuss the quality of courses, professors and college campuses. While a renowned resource among college students, the forum is anonymous and open for anyone to edit, and thus, potentially susceptible to error and tomfoolery.
“I think it’s great for Hofstra to post it on the portal because it is exclusively made by and for Hofstra,” said senior mass media studies major Ari Richman. “Unfortunately, I only had knowledge of RateMyProfessor.com as a resource, but being able to see the results of a CTR that almost every student completed would have made a difference in the teachers or classes I’ve chosen.”
Though in his final year, Richman did not learn of the resource until this semester upon receiving Honors College Dean Warren Frisina’s email plug. Frisina sent a mass email to Honors College students encouraging them to login to their portal and scour the PDF.
“As good as this information is, it’s not perfect. The ‘interface’ is not pretty, and there are no fancy interactive graphics. Still, it’s valid information. Share this with your friends. Too few students know about this amazing resource,” said Frisina in the email.
Guidance when choosing courses can particularly aid freshmen, most of whom registered on their own for the first time this past Sunday. Among other freshmen, Matthew Matuza, a freshman biomedical engineering major wish he knew.
“I use RateMyProfessor.com. I see who are the highest rated professors and I try to fit one of their classes into my schedule, said Matuza. “It’s definitely a problem that students don’t know about this. If I would’ve read the reviews that other students gave one of my professors that I have this semester, I probably would not be in his class right now.”
