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Monday, April 18, 2016 — 3A
addition, no evaluations for faculty
during their first three years at
the University will be released.
Finally, if there are unforeseen and
significant circumstances, faculty
are able to opt out of releasing the
data for that semester.
In 2014, the average response
rate for course evaluation data
was marked at slightly above 50
percent.
Courses
for
which
the
evaluations are not released will
be marked with a code that will
inform students why the data
was not released. SACUA chair
Silke-Marie Weineck, professor of
comparative literature, said this
will help flag faculty that are opting
out time after time again.
“If there was a faculty member
that abused the opt-out option —
which I don’t think they will — it
would show up pretty quickly
because there would be opt-out
after opt-out,” Weineck said. “I
have no worries about that; I just
want to protect faculty, because
every once in a while, someone can
have such a brutal semester and it
wouldn’t be fair or representative.”
Angela
Dillard,
professor
of
Afroamerican
and
African
Studies and associate dean for
Undergraduate Studies in LSA,
wrote in an e-mail interview that
the release of evaluations is a way
for students to learn more about
the courses they are taking.
“Giving students access to more
information about courses is a
benefit,” Dillard wrote. “It could
also begin to make students more
accountable for both the quantity
and quality of feedback they supply.
We need to address this dimension
of student evaluations and begin to
shift the culture around them.”
The process of releasing the
evaluations
has
spanned
the
course of this academic year. After
University administrators came to
SACUA with a proposal to release
course evaluations in Fall 2015, the
Faculty Senate voted in October
2015 to postpone the release of
evaluations, opening debate on
the issue up until the committees
reached
decisions
earlier
this
semester.
Ultimately, the two committees
were formed to balance out
student
concerns
—
Central
Student
Government
leaders
pushed heavily for release of the
evaluations — and faculty ones.
In a November 2015 op-ed, CSG
President Cooper Charlton and his
administration stated their goals of
having evaluations ready for Fall
2016, saying “course evaluations
were established for students, by
students”.
LSA junior Anushka Sarkar,
former CSG chief programming
officer, served on both committees
and said she was proud to have
been part of the process.
“I am very proud of Cooper
Charlton’s
administration
for
pushing this out,” Sarkar said.
“They had promised the student
body at the beginning of their
term that they would get this
information available to students
because they believed this would be
incredibly important for students
to have this data.”
Sarkar said alternatives students
are using, such as Rate My
Professors, aren’t allowing students
to make informed decisions about
their courses. She added that she
has relied on alternative, biased
information in the past to make
choices about classes.
“Students are going to be very
pleased to have this information
available,”
she
said.
“Now
that students have access to a
standardized and educated data
set, they will be able to make
more informed decisions about
their courses and that’s really
important.”
Engineering prof. Bill Schultz,
vice chair of SACUA, said the
postponement of the release until
now allowed faculty and students
to make the process more attentive
to community needs.
“We wanted to do this in a
thoughtful way,” Schultz said.
“If this was going to be officially
released, we wanted to have the
instrument to change it, to make
it less of a popularity contest and
more of a thoughtful process that
talks about learning outcomes
students might see in the course.”
unique circumstance in which
editorial
and
the
business
opportunities collide.
“Our audience, advertisers and
subscribers reflect this reality:
the world is a lot closer now. They
are saying, ‘if you do something
in Europe, count us interested,’”
Harris said. “We are doing this
because it’s interesting, but we’re
also doing this because we think
it’s a robust business opportunity.
I think that’s pretty exciting
when you can combine attractive
editorial targets with a business
model that can be sustained.”
Panelists also touched on how
modern audiences can be reached
in a world of social media and
unlimited information sources
online. Baquet said despite the
shifts in accessibility, journalists
should listen to their audiences,
who he said have demonstrated
they want serious and compelling
stories — both domestic and
abroad.
“If
people
look
at
their
audience, people want serious
stuff,” Baquet said. “No one’s
coming to the New York Times in
droves because of our coverage
of Britney Spears.”
Amanpour noted that though
foreign news often offers a
platform
for
an
audience’s
desires and journalist’s interests
to overlap, the craft of a journalist
should also be focused on more
than pleasing the audience.
“The
whole
point
of
information is to tell you about
what you don’t know you don’t
know,” she said.
Harris echoed Amanpour’s
sentiment,
saying
journalism
should emphasize “feeding them
their spinach” in a compelling
way.
“I think journalism has an
obligation to be interesting,”
Harris said. “The world is
interesting, we should be
interesting.
The
human
dimensions
of
a
story
are
important and I don’t believe
in making an audience do
something
dutifully,
it’s
a
challenge to your journalism
storytelling abilities to make a
story interesting.”
He added that distinctions
between old and new journalism
are outdated, saying just as the
field of journalism as a whole
evolves, so should the way
foreign news is approached and
discussed.
EVALUATIONS
From Page 2A
WALLACE
From Page 2A
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The Michigan Daily, former
CSG President Cooper Charlton
said the amendment would have
allowed CSG to review proposed
amendments concurrently with
SRAC.
“This doesn’t eliminate any
power from anyone. It just
allows students to be more
involved in the process,” he said.
“And they shot it down. We were
very disappointed in this. The
CSG team is very disappointed
with SRAC this year. We believe
they are very out of touch with
students.”
Speaking to the honor code,
Charlton said the proposal did
not pass due to its alteration
by the SRAC and their refusal
to work collaboratively with
students.
“SRAC was an extremely
intelligent
and
wise
body;
however, they were extremely
out of touch with the students,”
he said.
MICHIGAN
From Page 1A
Read more at MichiganDaily.com