As registration begins for next semester, many students look to ensure that they are enrolled in classes taught by favorite or well-liked professors. Although the criteria individual students use to judge their teachers may vary, the Illinois Student Senate provides Instructor and Course Evaluation System evaluations as a more objective portrait of many teachers on campus, said Melissa Kennedy, chair of the ISS academic affairs committee.

“Students can check the results and see how their prospective instructors or courses were rated by students in previous semesters, to help make registration decisions easier by choosing highly rated instructors,” Kennedy said. “It is important to note, however, that it is an incomplete list, due to the fact that some instructors choose not to participate in the evaluations and others choose to keep their results private and not release them to the Student Senate.”

The ISS maintains an online database that allows students to look over all ICES information from as far back as 2002. This means that it is possible to track trends in instructor performance and also draw opinions of professors from a large and varied body of information, according to the site.

“ISS has formatted the results so that students can easily find their professors and courses and see how previous students have evaluated that instructor/course,” Kennedy said. “We update the results each semester, and the information can always be found on the ISS Web site.”

Kennedy also said she believes most teachers take the evaluations fairly seriously.

“The fact is, many departments use the information from ICES for various different things for their faculty,” she said. “Departmental evaluations, tenure, salary raises, etc.”

Many students also seem to assign at least some importance to the questionnaires when they fill them out.

“If I like the teacher, I grade them very well,” said Bronson Eshleman, junior in LAS. “If I don’t like them, I may just give them bad grades on everything and not take it as seriously. It’s pretty much all or nothing.”

Although they have the option to keep results quiet, many professors choose to participate in the ICES program. Some even elect to ask questions of their own in addition to the mandatory evaluation questions included by the Senate, providing them with more specialized feedback on the way they teach their classes.

Despite the apparent availability of information and the regular intervals at which ICES evaluations are filled out and published, some students are not aware that results are available at all.

“I didn’t even know we could look at the results anywhere,” Eshleman said. “I didn’t know that’s what it was for.”