By Ken Panton
Editor, the Gauntlet,
[Re: USRIs]
If others shared my experience, the low response rate of students for Fall 2005 course evaluations may be a result of potential respondents being shut out of the USRI system when they tried to access it. In my case, I received emails from my faculty in mid-November reminding me to submit course evaluations. There was no response deadline mentioned in the email. Nor was there any mention of deadlines that I could locate on the USRI web pages. In view of the missing information, it seemed a reasonable assumption to me that the deadline would be sometime soon after the end of classes.
Apparently that is not the case, though the exact deadline remains a mystery. I could suggest to Dr. Woodrow that USRI information for Winter 2006 and subsequent terms include a deadline date for responding. A further, somewhat less critical, suggestion would be that the deadline be after the completion of coursework so that the evaluation might be based upon the entire course.