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It’s the last day of class, there are five minutes left, and your professor just passed out class evaluations. Your sweetie is waiting for you at Rubio’s, and you are really craving some fish tacos. So you scribble in the bubbles on the front of the form, flip it over, scrawl “Get a new hairpiece,” and leave the class in a flurry.

That may sound ridiculous to some, but actually, one friend relayed the story of a student who wrote the “hairpiece” quip on an evaluation to me.

I bet most students can recall a similarly droll remark they’ve included on an evaluation. But amusing anecdotes aside, there is a problem with the class evaluations when comments like this show up.

In a Dec. 6 Daily Bruin story about making class evaluations available to students, UCLA administrators voiced their faith in the evaluations. When asked whether making the evaluations available to students would dilute their value, Arnold Scheibel, the chairman for the Committee on Teaching, and Barbara Geddes, vice chairwoman of the political science department, both said students take the evaluations seriously and making them available to students would not change the quality of the evaluations.

Scheibel, Geddes and other administrators at UCLA are sadly mistaken if they think a number UCLA students take class evaluations seriously. Some students use the evaluations to vent about professors and TAs they dislike, and if students enjoy their instructors, they give little thought to the superlatives they quickly scribble on the back of the evaluations before scurrying out of class. (Some even leave as the evaluations are being handed out.)

“People write truthfully if they are very pleased or very upset with a class, so the results get skewed,” fourth-year mathematics student Adam Hirsch believes.

While some may debate whether class evaluations should be made available to students, that discussion is moot until the evaluation process is modified so that students’ evaluations become more meaningful assessments of their classes.

“The evaluations are a bad way to keep tabs on professors,” fourth-year aerospace engineering student Nick Martin said. “Students care more about getting out of class than writing evaluations. When a teacher leaves 20 minutes early and tells students to do evaluations, students do it in five minutes and leave.”

Other UCLA students echoed Martin’s sentiment. I took an informal survey of students in a discussion section as they filled out evaluations of a TA. Only nine of the 18 students surveyed said that they took the evaluations seriously. While this survey is not representative of the student populace, other informal questioning led me to believe that many students think the evaluations are, well, a joke.

“I was convinced one professor came to class drunk, so in my evaluation I told him he shouldn’t come to class trashed,” fourth-year chemistry student Matt Susnow said.

The problem is, while students do not take the evaluations seriously, professors and TAs do. Philip Potter, a political science graduate student and TA, said he uses the evaluations “as a proving ground for teaching strategies that I’m employing for the first time.”

Potter said he takes students’ comments in the evaluations to heart. That seems to be the case across the board – from professors to entire departments.

“My department takes the evaluations seriously in writing up reports for merit increases and promotion to tenure and full professor,” history professor Stephen Aron said. “We always include a section on teaching, in which the numerical ratings are discussed and comments are often excerpted. I’ve always read the comments closely. Although I’m less concerned about occasional comments that the readings were too long and too dry, I do worry if numbers of students complain that I’ve talked too fast – I do – and that I haven’t made myself understood.”

There are a few things that can be done to improve the in-class evaluations. First, students should rein in their griping. Professors and TAs say they do take the comments seriously, so it’s possible the insight students offer will improve classes.

“Students should be realistic about what they comment on,” Potter said. “Many complaints refer to things that TAs and even faculty have no control over, and are therefore ignored. However, a comment on the merits of a particular assignment or a specific suggestion on how to improve the course is very likely to get incorporated.”

The quality of the evaluations could also be improved if instructors tried to make it seem like they cared about the evaluations. Usually, instructors are rather blasé about the whole affair, and that doesn’t inspire students to put in any effort.

“If it’s apparent that the professor or TA doesn’t care what students write in the evaluations, students will think that it’s a formality and will not write much,” political science graduate student and TA Paul Osher said. “When I was an undergrad, I surely did that more often than not. Before I pass out my evaluations, I beg my students to take them seriously and the result is that there are only a few that don’t write comments.”

Most importantly, something needs to be done about the timing of the evaluations. It’s unreasonable to expect students to thoughtfully complete evaluations on the last day of class, during the last minutes of lecture.

“Perhaps we should find a different way to have evaluations completed than as is usually the case – at the end of the last lecture, when students are less likely to hang around and write extensive commentary,” Aron said.

Evaluations could be done eighth week, before the stresses of finals have begun to distract students, but at a time when students can fairly assess their classes. It’s hard to think of something nice to say about a professor on Friday of week 10, when you know you will be spending Saturday and Sunday studying for a Monday final.

Come to think of it, I need to get back to studying, which has been forced upon me by “cruel” professors.

E-mail Miller at dmiller@media.ucla.edu.