Editorial: Advisers should be evaluated

Before students declare a major, their primary sources for academic support and counsel are the faculty advisers within their residential colleges to whom they are assigned at the start of their freshman year. Although these advisers play a crucial role for underclassmen — particularly for freshmen — in aiding the process of selecting courses, choosing a major and addressing general academic difficulties, there is currently no comprehensive mechanism for evaluating them and providing them with feedback. Since the first two years of coursework critically shape the rest of a student’s academic experience, we believe that such a mechanism should be put in place.

Currently, at the end of each semester, students complete a course evaluation form on SCORE before they can access their final grades. In addition to providing other students with a number of different assessments of a given course or professor, these evaluations also provide faculty access to detailed commentary and criticism about numerous different aspects of their courses. The University ought to establish a similar tool for the assessment of faculty advisers. Of course, students do not pick their advisers, so there would be no need to give students access to the results of the evaluations. Rather, the evaluations would be an important tool for both the faculty advisers and the residential college staff who work with them. Advisers would be able to see what students think they do well and what they need to work on, while the residential college staff could look both at the feedback given to individual advisers and more broadly at common patterns, problems and complaints that might be addressed in the general preparation advisers receive. The evaluations could also help pair incoming freshmen with advisers, a process that currently seems largely dependent upon the intended majors students indicate before they arrive at college but which could be made somewhat less arbitrarily if it turns out that identifiable types of students work particularly well or badly with a given adviser.

Finally, perhaps one of the most recurrent problems with the relationship between underclassmen and faculty advisers is not related to the quality of a given adviser’s counsel, but simply to students’ underuse: Many students meet with their assigned adviser only when they are required to get a signature for their course enrollment forms. If students simply are asked on an evaluation to note how often they made use of their adviser and what might have compelled them to do so more often, advisers would be able to increase their contact with reluctant advisees — very often the students who could most benefit from such meetings.

Currently, residential college staff do solicit general feedback on various college programs, which may provide some information about the faculty advising program. But if feedback were to be administered centrally through SCORE in imitation of the course evaluation system, it would be vastly more effective at soliciting detailed information about advisors. Although faculty advisers are often forgotten by the time upperclassmen are embroiled in the work for their major and regularly in contact with departmental advisers, they undeniably have a strong impact in setting the stage for students’ academic life at Princeton. Advisee feedback could significantly increase the benefits such advisers already provide, with little chance for harm.