Make PIEs Optional

By: Athena Wang

At the end of each term, all students are asked to complete their PIEs (Post Instructional Evaluations) for all their classes. The catch is this: every incomplete evaluation results in a dickey for the offending student. While the risk of punishment definitely ensures participation, it brings one to question the quality of the feedback. 

Many students just complete them quickly and move on. The growth and improvement of a class, however, depends on constructive feedback that PIEs often don’t reveal. Worse still, many Exonians are endlessly busy under intense levels of stress. People like me, who often forget to check their emails, may just end up with seven dickeys.

Although evaluations and reflections are essential to the improvement of any course, they’re only relevant if there’s a problem. To the majority of students who aren’t experiencing problematic events in class, these forms seem like just a timesuck. People already have so much homework to do, papers to write and tests to study for. Some students just don’t have any energy left to fill out an evaluation. 

In the case of PIEs, we penalize this lack of effort. For this reason, students often fill them out for the sake of getting it done. Many don’t even leave comments—they just fill in the bubbles neutrally and move on. Therefore, the information we gain from these evaluations may not be well-founded.

Another reason why students may not take these forms seriously is because they fear confidentiality being broken. Some might not feel that health classes are the most productive, for instance, but I doubt most would feel comfortable sharing that opinion. What if it wasn’t anonymous? 

Even where anonymity does exist, some still feel uncomfortable. In fact, that happens already—when we were doing METICs for a fall term class, I felt very embarrassed when my particularly negative review was read aloud, even though the paper I had written it on didn’t have my name.

The debate also lies in whether the questions in these reflective surveys actually provoke constructive responses. My friend was telling me about her French class, in which she had to fill out a survey on “how to increase participation” from the teacher and from students. She noted that some prompts were very generic and she wasn’t sure how to answer them. And other questions were just downright frustrating. One asked: “What grade would you give yourself in the class currently?” 

I quote my friend, “It’s not my job to grade myself! Can’t I just learn in peace and not have to worry even more about grades?” Although I would say it’s probably a good idea to evaluate one’s own performance from time to time, the quotation demonstrates the frustration many Exonians have with these sorts of forms. It becomes even worse on the PIEs—the questions are incredibly vague and, by design, wildly generic.

Although many people are already opposed to the idea of having so many forms to fill out, we also need to have a growth mindset. Obviously, one can point out many problems with our school, especially when we look at the various protests that have occurred on campus. These problems can only be solved by making the administrators aware of the problem—PIEs seek to do just that. 

But is it productive or necessary to make the whole school fill out forms on the pain of multiple dickeys, when not everyone has a problem to be resolved? Is it a reasonable tactic to use vague forms to get that feedback from absolutely everyone? Attention for those who really need it is both more effective and less burdensome to students.

So what action should we take to minimize annoyances within the student body but also maximize needed constructive feedback to improve things? An obvious solution would be to have PIE forms readily available to those who care—conducting PIEs this way would avoid subjecting the entire student body to another needless task.