The Undergraduate Council of the Faculty Senate voted 11-0-6 yesterday to support ASUA's proposal to make faculty/course evaluations publicly available.

The council requested a formal presentation of the 11 proposed evaluation questions at next week's meeting. Should that proposition be approved, the proposal will move to the full Faculty Senate in March.

Based on a similar system at Northeastern University, the evaluations would include questions about course difficulty, amount learned, overall workload and instructor accessibility.

"If we have this sort of information and don't make it available, it sends the wrong message," said William Matter, council member and associate professor of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences.

The evaluation results would be available to students annually, showing response distribution to each question ranging from A to F.

However, there are some policy and resource issues that still need to be resolved, said Jennifer Franklin, coordinator of the Office of Instructional Assessment and Evaluation Services, the University of Arizona entity which currently handles evaluations.

"The kind of reported results vary per department," Franklin said. A technical problem regarding the connotations of "accessibility" and "approachability" in the questions also requires attention.

Despite this, Associated Students President Benjamin Driggs was decidedly in favor of public evaluations.

"Publishing evaluations will allow students to make better decisions," Driggs said. "Having student access will make them take on a greater role at the university."

The committee vote comes on the heels of an ASUA survey that polled 50 state universities across the country about faculty/course evaluation formats. Of the 49 schools that evaluated teacher performance, 23 allowed student access to at least a portion of the evaluations.

"We wanted to get the information together with the facts and figures and make a quantitative evaluation," said Rebecca Carter, co-author of the survey and ASUA administrative assistant.