It has already been one month into the new semester and it is amazing how much work has been done thus far, let alone how much is left to do. Earlier in the semester, the Independent Council hammered out a new course survey; its results will be published in The Poly. The survey will benefit the RPI community by providing useful information about courses based on first-hand accounts. After hours of revising questions, selecting courses to survey, and drafting up the survey proof, we finally had a product. Two weeks later we made 10,000 copies.
That was a half-semester ago. Near the end of last semester, we handed out our surveys to selected classes that, to our amazement, yielded a healthy number of returns. Now the Council is working on the results from the fall course survey. Thanks to the labor of council members and encouragement from professors and past IC presidents, I’m pleased to say that the surveys have begun the process of being sorted, tabulated, and verified.
"But why go through all this effort when we have IDEA surveys?" people have asked me. The simple answer lies in the way the IDEA surveys are administrated. I am sure almost every student here has seen those pink survey forms at the end of every semester—the endless questions that ask, as you sit in on your last CANOS lecture, "How did this course enhance your artistic understanding?" instead of asking important questions like "Were your laptops useful for this class? Was the classroom conducive to this type of class format?" These issues are sidestepped and never confronted. To top off the situation, the results of IDEA surveys are primarily for administrative use. They are never published and the only two people who ever see them before they are filed away are the instructor you are reviewing and his department head—not to mention that the results can be "weighted," based on criteria the instructors choose, using the blue IDEA forms.
"So," you might ask, "are your surveys perfect?" My personal answer is simple: no, every survey has its flaws; we just hope you will find our questions poignant and our results helpful. I wish to encourage any member of the RPI community with questions about our survey to e-mail me at huntj@rpi.edu for more detailed information. If you are interested in helping with the IC surveys, please contact me as well, as we still have seats on the council for new members (one freshman, one junior, two seniors, three graduates, and many members at large). In closing, I also wish to thank The Poly for making the IC column a reality again.
