By Caitlyn Meisner | Copy Editor
As much as we may hate to complete course evaluations at the end of the semester and think BUBooks is full of disgruntled students, we need them.
All students can agree they’ve checked BUBooks when planning out their schedules each semester; they check on the prospective professors to see which ones they might like better than the other.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and I personally find it a helpful tool — sometimes. Other times, it really is filled with students who had a uniquely bad experience with a professor and decided to roast them on BUBooks to let their anger out. Those experiences aren’t the best judge of character, so it can skew the perspective of the teacher.
To combat this, I say all students should try to leave an unbiased, neutral review of their professors on BUBooks each semester. Since it’s the beginning of the semester, start keeping mental notes for a rating and evaluation for your professors when May rolls around.
I’ve adopted this policy since my freshman year, and it’s helped me reflect on my experience with each teacher after the class is completely finished and my final grade is determined. While it’s definitely tough to remain neutral when reviewing professors, I’ve found it’s a good exercise in unbiased writing, a skill most people need in their careers.
It would be best if BUBooks was populated with more neutral reviews instead of what it’s filled with now. If you go take a look at some of the reviews on there, you’ll quickly see that it’s a real mixed bag.
When I was an underclassman, I found that I was very easily influenced when choosing professors based on word of mouth and what I read on BUBooks. Some professors had horrible ratings from a few students, so I thought maybe I shouldn’t risk it and take a different professor. One student’s bad experience is not the experience of all students, and I think that’s important to remember when reading those reviews.
If you really want to stick it to a particular professor, leave that in the course evaluations. Those are meant to reach professors directly and the administration to improve the classes; I’m not really sure how much professors check BUBooks to see how much the student body likes them, but I bet it isn’t their main form of receiving feedback.
While both BUBooks and course evaluations are anonymous, they serve different purposes: they have completely different audiences, so write to those audiences. Tell students what they will find helpful in choosing a professor for an intro-level course in their major and tell the professor how much you hated a certain project.
Both of these tasks only take about five minutes to complete, so do it during a break during the day or when you’re traveling home for winter or summer break.
