In the last installment of this glorious column, I took the opportunity to vent over the fact that we, as students, must fill out those dreaded teacher evaluation surveys.
Well, in an attempt to actually make a difference instead of merely whining about this travesty the university calls a survey, I am going to attempt to shed a little light on the root of the problem and offer a solution.
I know that most students are anxious to darken in the infamous little bubbles and get finished as quickly as possible, or take out a semester’s worth of frustrations on one or more seemingly heartless instructors.
Both options leave little time for reading the fine print on our oh-so-beloved surveys.
Perhaps it is in this fine print that we will find the root of all the problems with these surveys.
If one looks at the top of a survey, one will find that the survey was “abstracted primarily from the Aleamoni: Course/Instructor Evaluation Questionnaire.”
And who was the author of this sweet, little questionnaire with the funny name, you ask? Why it was none other than Lawrence M. Aleamoni, copyright 1975. (By night he is the winged avenger known simply as Captain Aleamoni, the defender of payments to former spouses everywhere).
So, the problem here is not just that the survey was “abstracted from” (that sounds painful – like a root canal or a rectal exam), but that it dates back to 1975 – before most of the people who are filling out the survey were even born. These vague and confusing questions/items in these surveys might have made sense when Donna Summer, white guys with afros and the Rubik’s Cube made sense.
We need something with which we can identify and understand. It is therefore understandable that we, as students of ETSU, should come up with the questions and items for these surveys.
We could set up a booth in the Culp Center and give away free shirts or suckers to get students’ attention. After all 12 of those interested come by to give some input, we can put together one mother of a survey.
That is providing we can get past the SGA’s bureaucratic red tape. Well, we don’t need any funding for this project. After all, it usually takes anywhere from 16 to 1,400 months to circumvent a governmental body.
Our surveys would include questions/items we understand and can answer confidently (applying the same level of agreement of disagreement format), such as: “the course didn’t suck too bad;” “I want to kill myself less when other teaching methods are used;” and “smoking a six-pound crack rock before each class definitely enhanced my learning experience.”
Not only could these surveys be used to evaluate instructors and classes but the entertainment possibilities are endless.
At least we know it couldn’t be any worse than Captain Aleamoni’s retro assessment, which might be effective if it included one hit of acid for each little bubble.

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