Source Guide staff members will begin making major changes to the publication’s website and goals this summer, editor-in-chief Matthew Tabor said yesterday, after Source Guide student evaluations from the fall 2002 semester were released on the website this week.
Tabor described this semester as a ‘big transition period for The Source Guide’ because he said a new staff hopes to soon remake the Guide into a publication that is less ‘subjective’ and more ‘concrete.’
Though the Guide, which contains student evaluations of instructors and courses, remains essentially unchanged this semester, Guide staff members will begin making changes over the summer, Tabor said.
The Source Guide’s main goal is ‘to provide students with reviews of courses and professors primarily so they can get an idea of which courses they want to take before they meet with their academic advisor,’ Tabor said. While that main goal will remain in place, Tabor said he wants to make the Guide into a resource that describes courses, rather than judging them.
The staff’s first major step will be to create for students a new course evaluation form, which is the basis for the Guide’s professor and course ratings. The Guide’s current questions that ask students the educational value or the level of difficulty of the course are highly subjective, Tabor said.
‘We want to ask questions that students have the perspectives to answer,’ Tabor said. ‘The questions will be more specific and less subjective. We want to come up with a form that will be useful to both students and departments.’
Currently the Guide offers course and instructor evaluations from the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering, Tabor said. Participation for the Guide is optional for departments and professors in the two colleges and varies from semester to semester, he said.
During the month of registration, the Guide website receives hundreds of hits a day, Tabor said. While the number of hits is significant, Tabor said not all students can yet benefit from what the Guide has to offer because of the limited number of colleges that participate.
In order to make the Guide more useful to students, Tabor said he wants to ultimately increase the number of colleges that are involved.
‘We are going to work with departments and professors throughout the process to increase the participation of professors, colleges and departments,’ Tabor said. ‘We want to make it as accessible to students as possible.’
Despite the fact that the Guide will soon be offering a wider range of information to more students, Tabor said he feels it is still a valuable resource because it offers students the perspectives of their fellow students on courses.
Through student commentary, the Guide provides information such as a course’s workload, pace, attendance policy and skills a student should have prior to entering the class, Tabor said.
‘We hope that students will consult The Source Guide before their academic advising appointments,’ Tabor said. ‘We are most valuable in conjunction with them. The more perspectives the students can get the better, and we attempt to provide them with the student perspective.’
Other proposed changes to the Guide include a redesigned website and the inclusion of the syllabi from all classes offered by the university, Tabor said.
‘We have a new staff, new ideas, new ambitions and really a new approach to evaluating classes,’ Tabor said.
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