Seeing the Onward State’s version of the SRTEs made me actually want to try and attempt to complete, I mean come on, who wouldn’t want to take out their frustrations about their classes and get some sort of relief at the end of the semester, or close to the semester. But then I saw the real SRTE questions and I was slightly discouraged, and well, the amount of SRTEs I saw on my Angel account made me slightly less wary to fill them out.
Even though they may sound silly, SRTEs are a great example of civic responsibility. It it our duty as students of Penn State to take the time to rate our teachers and our classes in complete and utter honesty, to make sure that the university’s academics remain top notch, and that we as students, receive the best education as possible. Our teachers use this information to improve their classes and their teaching styles. One of my teachers explained the importance of SRTEs for her work: they use it to improve upon their current teaching styles, the class materials, i.e. the literature selected for that semester, and the university uses these SRTEs to determine whether or not to offer these teachers a tenure and to continue with their employment at the university. SRTEs give us, the students, the opportunity to give feedback to our teachers, and with some teachers, that may be easy to do in an open setting. There was a time when the opinions of students in college were not appreciated. They thought that a student’s job was to go to school and appreciate the fact that they were getting an education. Now SRTEs are mandatory across all universities because people value the opinions of students and we have to take advantage of our rights and actually try to go through with them.
At first I didn’t think that SRTEs were that big of a deal, but I was going to do them just because I knew that I had time to. However, I started to understand the importance of them more and more when each one of my professors told my class that we needed to do them. Some departments base next year’s salary completely off of SRTEs in addition the tenure and the other things that you mentioned, which are very important to the lives of every professor here on campus. I didn’t really think of it as a civic duty at first, but the more that I think about it, filling out these evaluations is. We are part of a community that strives for great education, so if we can give feedback to make this school the best it can be, then it is our duty to do so.