Tin Soldier

Course Evaluations: Secrets Revealed!

Note: This article is hosted here for archival purposes only. It does not necessarily represent the values of the Iron Warrior or Waterloo Engineering Society in the present day.

*Disclaimer: The content of this article in no way reflects the personal views of the author or the Iron Warrior and is intended for entertainment purposes only. The content of this article is not true and is not meant to be taken seriously.

Every term we fill out the infamous course evaluation for each course. On these forms, you get to score your professors on pretty much everything from their typically lacklustre teaching abilities to the usefulness of the course itself (perhaps that was wishful thinking). But one has to wonder….  What actually happens to these commonplace forms?

Perhaps the best way to approach this conundrum is to examine the alleged effects that the feedback obtained from the said course evaluations has on the courses themselves. Year in year out, courses seldom change. Obviously, content shouldn’t change that much – unless your professor did so well on last year’s course evaluations and the results were so phenomenal that they had to change the course and probably their identity (we’ll get to why in a minute) to keep the privilege of teaching it. Now just one minute, now we’re assuming that these course evaluations actually have an impact on anything?! What! Crazy!

Aside from content the most common things that may change as a result of course evaluations are ‘deliverables’ which is a fancy-shmancy balmy faculty term for homework, projects, exams and everything they know students hate. Every year, before the profs actually get their evaluations, the UWMHRA (UW Mental Health Revenue Agency) reads them first and if students were to nice (i.e.: if the feedback was actually good), they threaten to fire the prof because they caused the students to be unable to meet their annual mental health contribution on top of their tuition. They threw a wrench in the ‘survival of the fittest’ regime, which is at the very centre of the UWMHRA’s vision and values. In addition, they torture the prof to make up for the lost mental health revenues – this is why so many good professors have left UW and now we have so many, oh so many bad ones!

It’s true. Shocking right? But it does make complete, utter and total sense: Now you know why all of those exams are so ridiculously impossibly difficult that no matter how long you study and how long you work and no matter how much of your mental health is sacrificed for the UWMHRA, you still feel like you just barely maybe passed!  

Isn’t nice to know it’s all for the greater good though! UW just wants its grads to be the fittest survivors EVAR so that they can continue paying mental health revenues long after they graduate. It’s even better for UW if the survivors pursue graduate studies, of which a major component is being turned into a ghost so that the professors can tell the little undergrads that their labs are secretly haunted by dead grad students (survivors of the ‘survival of the fittest’) to keep them from asking (or begging) them for coop jobs! (The severe lack of coop jobs is another mechanism by which the UWMHRA collects a hideously gross amount of its revenue). 

So now you know the truth. The next time you’re asked to fill out a course evaluation, DON’T! Tell your all of your friends – this is a call for mutiny! Everyone take your course evaluations, rip them up in tiny little bits, preferably on the order of nanometers or even better angstroms in dimension, and then get one of the ghosts of a dead grad student to burn it for you. Warning: Do not burn it yourself because the UWMHRA are watching you every second, oh yes, every second, and they will know (But the ghosts are undetectable). And the nanometers/angstroms dimension is absolutely crucial because if somehow they do not get burned, the UWMHRA does not have the necessary equipment to characterize the little bits as a course evaluation as it has not been developed yet on account of the fact the chemical, physical and electrical properties are no different from regular Scantron paper!

Mark my words! Do not be lazy about this!! Do you want the UWMHRA to torture anyone? Do you want your terrible prof to be rewarded for their cruelty? Let’s put an end to this epic conspiracy. NOW.

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