Since 1985, students at Penn State have been filling out Student Rating of Teacher Effectiveness (SRTE) surveys, those bubble sheets that ask students to evaluate courses and instructors at the end of every semester.

On a scale of 1 to 7, how helpful are the SRTEs? I'd give them a 2 -- not very useful to students in reality, but potentially helpful should university winds favor a new "student-centered" course (to borrow a lip-serviced term from Penn State President Graham Spanier's State of the University address).

Penn State Executive Vice President and Provost Rodney Erickson explained in an e-mail to me how SRTEs are used to promote quality instruction:

"SRTE results are used in promotion and tenure decisions, annual performance reviews, salary increase allocations, and more generally within departments as signals for necessary changes that may be warranted in curricular matters."

Quite frankly, I don't buy it.

Instructors don't need SRTEs: Good ones already know they're good, and bad teachers know they stink and have little reason to care.

Even if a poor teacher actually wanted to improve, I'm at a loss to understand what she is going to do with a 1.7 in response to the SRTE question-statement "The instructor is excited about teaching."

Instructor: "Why didn't I think of that! Next time around, I need to get excited about teaching! Hooked on the SRTE worked for me!"

No, the SRTE is not a particularly helpful teaching tool. However, the SRTE still has the potential to improve teaching quality at Penn State by functioning as a filter.

That would require using SRTE results as a criterion for tenure promotions. But as it stands, academia's ridiculous God -- the almighty research publication -- shadows classroom teaching prowess as a tenure review criterion. As long as there continues to be a fundamental conflict between the interests of promotion-seeking professors and those of diploma-shopping undergrads -- who don't care about their professor's avant-garde quantum theory research and just want to pass Intro to Calculus -- SRTEs will remain administrative niceties.

Since I don't expect academia to realign itself with the interests of undergrads anytime soon, the next logical step is to couple the power of the professor with the power of the purse, and give students the information they need to make "informed choices" about their teachers.

Ian Rosenberger and Takkeem Morgan, our new Undergraduate Student Government (USG) president and vice president, ran on the three-point platform that proposed "giving students the opportunity to view comments and ratings from other students about curriculum and instructor quality."

They suggest developing a Web site like the Internet start-up www.pickaprof.com to organize an online teacher and course evaluator for Penn State students.

Pickaprof has raised some eyebrows recently because it has used various state sunshine laws -- laws that often require public transparency among state-funded institutions -- to collect class grade frequency distributions, drop/add rates and student-teacher evaluations from reluctant state universities. Just like Penn State, some of the universities now participating in pickaprof had policies forbidding the release of such information to the public, citing reasons of academic integrity.

"If the course evaluations were to be published ... then you might have faculty alter their teaching just to look good in public," Spanier said at a meeting with USG last fall.

His sentiments are shared by Erickson, who wrote that he does not want a Web-based system where students "take potshots at faculty," and mentioned that professors are suing students at some universities for libel based on these kind of postings.

But according to Laura Beck, chairwoman of the USG Academic Assembly's course evaluation committee, it wasn't the administration's concerns about a potential high school "popularity contest" that kept USG from joining pickaprof last fall; it was the high cost. Pickaprof charges between $5,000 to $10,000, and student governments usually incur the cost.

Yet Spanier and Erickson's concerns are legitimate and will likely be echoed by the Faculty Senate, which has the ultimate say on whether or not to give students access to class statistics they're now denied.

Thus, Rosenberger and Morgan have their work cut out for them. They must: 1) find and fund a cheaper alternative to pickaprof; 2) persuade the provost, the president and most importantly the Faculty Senate to reconsider SRTEs, grade distributions and drop rates as public goods; 3) protect professors from libel and popularity contests where the easiest professor wins; and 4) mobilize an apathetic student body to make good use of the evaluator once it's up and running. USG already has an online course evaluator on its Daily Jolt Web site that no one uses.

In his State of the University address, Spanier worriedly mused that students increasingly "see themselves as consumers purchasing a service, and they expect it to be delivered to their specifications."

Well, I say: It's about time.