How hard is this class? Will I get an A? These are, for many students, the first concerns when deciding whether to take a class.
Searching for answers, students turn to Harvard’s Q Guide, which publishes student feedback on classes at the end of every semester. Also known as the Harvard FAS Course Evaluations in recent years, this comprehensive list of feedback features data on any given course’s workload and evaluations of its teaching staff, assignments, and other important aspects of the classroom experience.
In the past year, however, the Q Guide has looked different from those published in former years. Something is missing from many of the course reports: student comments.
On January 20th, 2021, Professor Joseph K. Blitzstein, who teaches one of Harvard’s most popular courses, Stat 110: an Introduction to Probability, emailed the Q Guide staff, asking why only a few Q Guide reports for Fall 2020 courses published student comments. The staff explained that it was a software vendor issue. Yet the same option to not display student comments still seems to be available this semester, Blitzstein said.
He chooses to show student comments. “I consider it very valuable for students to be able to see responses to that question, and valuable to me as a concentration advisor when discussing course selection with students,” Blitzstein said. “Often the qualitative comments for that question are more informative than the numerical ratings for a course.”
“I consider it very valuable for students to be able to see [student comments], and valuable to me as a concentration advisor when discussing course selection with students”
– Blitzstein
However, the Q Guide does still mandate that professors include other useful information for prospective students, such as professor ratings, hours spent on the course per week, and feedback on course assignments. Students report this type of information through a series of multiple-choice questions, in which they can select options ranging from unsatisfactory to excellent.
Connor Stoltz ’25 is an avid user of the Q Guide. He utilizes the annual report to make sure that he is taking classes that are right for him. “There was this class on game theory called Strategy, Conflict and Cooperation, which I thought sounded really cool. But the Q Guide made it seem like the class was poorly run so I chose to do a different Econ elective,” he said.
But Stoltz questions the usefulness of the guide without student comments: “Why would you not want to see what students tell other students? That’s arguably the most important thing about the class. What students tell other students is the course’s reputation.” Without student comments, it appears that the true reputation of a course is not conveyed in its Q Guide report.
Livie Jacks ’24 also finds the student comments extremely useful. “There is usually advice for how to do well, cautionary words about what to avoid, and sometimes I find things that steer me away but don’t seem to negatively affect others,” she said. “I was upset when they took the comments away because that is really the most valuable part of the Q Guide, and they give a ton of specific and honest information about each class.”
Professor David Laibson, who teaches the Economics series, Principles of Economics, another one of Harvard’s most popular courses, chooses to publish his student comments. This choice might seem unsurprising because many of his published comments read, “It’s more than you could ever ask for. It’s engaging, creative and really fun.”
For Laibson, though, his motivation for publishing student comments is much deeper. “We like giving the students the opportunity to communicate to future cohorts of potential students in the class because we think that students overall have wisdom to share,” he said. “We think that the experience of students that will take the course in the future will be increased by not just hearing from one or two friends.”’ The student response portion of the Q Guide provides students with an opportunity to hear from a variety of students that they would not otherwise have the chance to hear from.
– Laibson
“We like giving students the opportunity to communicate to future cohorts of potential students in the class because we think that students overall have wisdom to share”
For large classes, such as Economics 10a, which has around 770 students, the student response section creates a unified student narrative about the class. “This big sample is very useful because it averages out the idiosyncratic experiences of 1 or 2 people that you might happen to ask about the course,” Laibson shared. “I think there is a lot of value for students contemplating both what to take in the future and how to approach the course.”
As students take time over break to reflect on the courses they want to take during the spring semester, it is crucial that for each class they choose to take, they know what they are committing to. If the Q Guide lacks student voices, is it an effective means for student communication?
Grace von Oiste ’24 (gvonoiste@college.harvard.edu) is a Statistics Concentrator and needs to see student comments.