The Undergraduate Government of Boston College offered $5 White Mountain gift cards to students who came to the Rat yesterday and filled out five Professor Evaluation Profile Systems (PEPS) class evaluations. The evaluations are student-written reviews of professors and classes that can be accessed through the UGBC website.
PEPS has gone largely unmaintained over the past few years. The system is old and many of the reviews are outdated. UGBC has done well to provide incentive for increased reviews. PEPs has seriously needed recent and informative reviews in order to serve any sort of meaningful purpose for the student body.
This is an example of the practical and tangible work that UGBC should be striving to consistently achieve. It is something that UGBC can point to as producing legitimate and immediate results. While it seems relatively simple, it is a good way to attract student’s interest and demonstrate something UGBC can achieve.
With this in mind, the event had some weaknesses in execution. The PEPS system used to fill out new evaluations was still using the old class code system. A number of classes were not available in this old system and some were only available under a different class code. A Google form was made available for evaluating these new classes, but this still presents a general issue with PEPS. It would have been better to improve the PEPS system before holding this event, so that the classes listed would have reflected the current course load of students. Doing this would have boosted the benefit of the event and allowed for further efficiency in its execution. The system is old and needs a full revamp in this manner before it can once again become a tool frequently used by students during registration.
Student interest in this event was higher than expected, with the original table no longer large enough to hold all the students who wished to fill out evaluations. This led to a spreading out of students to different tables, where they were asked to fill out the evaluations on their own. While this was not ideal and might have contributed to some disorganization, it demonstrates the overall success of an event such as this. Students are interested in participating in well-advertised initiatives that have incentives. When they are encouraged to participate like this, they will, and organizations like UGBC should take advantage of this and reap the benefit by boosting struggling programs like PEPS.
Featured Image Courtesy of PEPS
