University students are encouraged to evaluate the University thoroughly before enrolling and to investigate departments before selecting a major. However, these students are prevented from examining the teaching effectiveness of their potential professors before attending classes. The quality of the instruction received plays a key role in shaping students’ perception of their overall collegiate experience. Yet, year after year, University students are expected to make course selection decisions without a reliable, objective source of information with regard to course quality.

The vast majority of elite American universities — Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, University of Chicago, Rice, etc. — grant students access to course evaluations in one form or another. Moreover, four Big Ten universities — Northwestern, Michigan, Wisconsin and Michigan State — have followed suit. In fact, of the top 36 universities recognized by the 2011 U.S. News and World Report, 27 grant students access to ratings.

The University’s policies were once far less restrictive. Since the implementation of the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) 35 years ago, course evaluations have occurred each semester funded, in part, by student fees. Nonetheless, at the sole discretion of individual instructors, results can be concealed from the student population — the option currently chosen by approximately 85 percent of faculty. While the costs to obtain, process, and compile this data continue, students are providing data to which they ultimately receive no access. The remaining 15 percent of evaluations were once made accessible by the University through a hard-copy publication titled “Outlook.” However, a decade ago, Outlook was discontinued, shifting the responsibility for publication to the Illinois Student Senate — an organization utterly unsuited for this task due to high turnover and limited expertise, resources and personnel. Simply put, University students have no access to a meaningful set of instructor and course evaluations upon which to base their academic decisions, and University policy seems designed to ensure that this continues.

Extensive research demonstrates that course evaluations represent an objective assessment of instructor performance, while workload, difficulty and grade distributions are not the drivers of student opinions. On the contrary, students do appreciate competent, engaging and rigorous instruction. Research performed with students in multi-section courses, who were asked to complete rating surveys before their final exams, demonstrated substantial correlation between student ratings and subsequent exam performance. Bluntly, better ratings were given by students who learned more, according to a 1981 report published by Peter Cohen, chief executive officer of Cowen Group, Inc. Another landmark study demonstrated that student ratings are reliable, valid and consistent across classes and over time, according to a 1987 report by Herbert Marsh, an educational psychologist.

The University of Illinois strives to be a place among the upper-echelon of the world’s research institutions; it aspires to produce independent researchers and professionals. Yet, the current policy inhibits students from connecting with and benefitting from the most passionate and engaging professors. Such aspirations require more than wishful thinking; students must be empowered to make the most of their years of education. Ultimately, the prestige of the University is measured by the success of its alumni. Better-informed students will graduate with more favorable perceptions of their academic experience at the University, boosting alumni donations, as well as generating positive publicity among prospective students and professional colleagues. The first concrete step in aligning the University’s policies with its aspirations should be granting all students access to the aggregate scores for the first two questions of all ICES surveys, assessing the overall course and the instructor’s performance therein.

Evan Coopersmith and William Goldshlag,

graduate students from The Engineering Dean’s Graduate Student Advisory Committee