It is that wonderful time of the year when the first 15 minutes of our classes are taken up by filling out professor evaluations. What happens to this information after it is taken by one of the professors' minions, sealed in that manila envelope and loaded into an armored car? Well, according to this fine institution's Web site, the evaluations are taken to the department and included in the professor's dossier to help make decisions about tenure and promotions.

That all sounds fine to me, but these evaluations need to be made available to the students. I think there is a serious problem with the fact that we are not given access to our own input, which is information that we might utilize to make more informed decisions during course selection. It is good in theory to allow all the departments to evaluate faculty for us, but I have a hard time believing that evaluations hold much weight once a professor is tenured. It is not just students that can get lazy after semesters drag on too long. There are a lot of fantastic professors here; but sadly, there are also some who have lost their passion for teaching.

Currently, the only available information comes from Web sites such as ratemyprofessor.com, but these are not controlled and any person can post as many times as he or she wishes. Sites like these are not fair to the professors, because they can be easily abused by students holding a grudge.

As students, we need more reliable information, and the administration needs to stay on top of professors who are not doing their jobs. By making these results public, it will keep some pressure on the teachers to perform well in their role as educators, while helping the students make good decisions with course selections.