Students – especially the NC State experience, and perhaps it will come this way again, given the usurious rates for student loans these days
– a lot of people were working their way through school, and they wanted to have a way–. In much the way that Duncan Hines had his restaurant guide, or Mobil has a travel guide, people wanted to evaluate their instructors.
Well, as you might imagine, not exactly popular with the faculty. But, now, wait a minute.
Educators are charged with evaluating students. Fine, and we can say that relationship is different, but rather than being hierarchical I just think it was a laudatory effort
to have a guide to see how students thought different professors and teachers actually dealt with the art of instruction.
It made for some controversy, and the irony was I had heard, you know, about a big university, it’ll be impersonal and you won’t know your professors.
Well, the obvious student buy-in is, hey; you get to rate your instructors. You get to grade the teachers.
Now, and you have to remember the days of computer programming and stuff, and there may be a couple of copies left in the Technician archives, but, as I recall, I believe the Technician printed the CCR as a supplement.
The technology of the time did not allow itself to really get into kind of a micro breakdown. It was kind of more of a macro study of–. I don’t know how good it was.
Probably the notion was more intent than the outcome, but then again, when you’re kids in college and you got – and I mean the guys who worked on this thing worked long and hard hours.
It may have helped them academically too, in statistics and all that, and I think it was a laudatory effort. But I mentioned historian Stephen Ambrose a little bit earlier and his disdain for student government
I read in the pages of his prose with great historical biographies. I think it’s an understandable tendency that professors and those who instruct callow youth
don’t like a sophomoric evaluation coming back their way, and that’s just part of the institutional angst or the give and take that goes on in a university.