We think our main concern should be the content of the students' files when they graduate from UC Santa Cruz and apply for a job or for graduate school.

The national standard is as follows:

Essay, GRE, GPA and transcript, three letters of recommendation, plus additional material such as sample papers and artwork.

We believe that this is the right amount of material and it represents a good balance between anonymous grades and personal evaluation.

As it stands now, Santa Cruz students will also have one evaluation for each course they attended. Many of the courses are not essential to future employers who must screen for the few evaluations that they find useful. Most employers will simply skip the evaluations altogether and rely on the letters of recommendation. We believe the faculty's time is better spent by focusing on the letters of recommendation rather than writing evaluations for each student.

Note that we simply propose to repeal MANDATORY evaluations. This was intentional. We wanted to leave the possibility of allowing the instructor to provide voluntary evaluations for some or all of the students. However this should be at the discretion of the instructor. Voluntary evaluations would probably be used only in cases when the instructor is in a position to write something meaningful. In particular, templates would become superfluous.

Whatever system we decide on should acknowledge the de facto system we have now. An evaluation may simply say: B+ performance. However, such evaluations are redundant. Course descriptions should only be used if the instructor thinks they will add to a student's file without cluttering it.

We propose to repeal MANDATORY evaluations, leaving the possibility of setting up a voluntary system. The student's file should be a short, convincing summary of the student's work.

Just as a matter of democracy, faculty should have the opportunity for a straight up or down vote on whether to repeal mandatory evaluations. Such a vote should not preclude the opportunity to consider an alternative voluntary system afterwards.

Manfred Warmuth, Computer Science
Maria Schonbek, Mathematics