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To LEQ or not to LEQ, that is the Question

Dec 03 2001 15:56

Dan L

As IC launches its new Lecturer Evaluation Questionnaire, Live! brings you the guide to using this useless piece of technology.

The wonderful LEQ system in action.

In the old days, students used paper and pens. Time moved on, paper becomes a rare commodity more expensive than gold, and pens were an even rarer item. At this point, Imperial College decided that a good way to waste money, would be the creation of a website where students could send their comments about what they thought of the teaching they received.

A bit sceptical, you may think so I though I would give the electronic system the benefit of the doubt. A thorough test by Live! seemed to be the only fair way to see if all these unfounded bad rumours were true.

Well this is what happened:

The first attempt was halted after about 15 seconds. The page refused to load - not a good start, maybe the LEQ website really is crap, and it did live up to the rumours. By the second time I was getting quite excited, the front page was loading, and I had my first sight of the horrendous colours and design style that had been used - Oh dear!

Well it had loaded so now for the ultimate test. Could I really log in with my personalised password, from none other than Sen Ganesh the ICU President. This scored 10 out of 10 in my survey, as I managed to login first time. With this accomplished there should be no problem I thought, and selected the "Student Menu", and chose the "Lecturer Evaluation Questionnaire" link. This is where the good news stops. The link took me to a screen announcing that there had been an error. It seems the rumours were correct - the electronic system is useless - IC have managed to do it again, so I give them 10 out of 10 for the website! Better luck next year!

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Discussion about “To LEQ or not to LEQ, that is the Question”

The comments below are unmoderated submissions by Live! readers. The Editor accepts no liability for their content, nor for any offence caused by them. Any complaints should be directed to the Editor.

1. Rob Dimond

Dec 03 2001 16:49

Same problem here. Is it completely broken or is there some lucky soul out there who can actually use this thing?

2. Buffy

Dec 03 2001 17:05

Yup! Got the same problem here as well. Must just be a great piece of IC design. maybe they should get DoC to write a decent system!

3. Paul J

Dec 03 2001 17:42

DoC designed system sounds like a good idea to me, but then again I am biased. Me and some mates reckon that a day will be sufficient to design the system. People will be required to log in with college username (and some form of password) to stop repeat submissions, but as the site will be hosted on the union servers, we then remove usernames from the results hence making the process anonymous.

Passwords could be retrieved via a secure webpage, then secure access to the LEQ gained via the secure union server. All safe!

This way, college get more representative results; what they do with them is anyone's guess.

4. Sam Sharpe

Dec 03 2001 19:47

what's all this stuff about using another password?

why not use your normal college login/password?????

the cgcu intranet uses a perl login cheching script that authenticates against IC, DoC and Aero - so you could login via that, store the logins for all completed users in a mySQL table, to prevent repeated logins - and then all this stuff about passwords would be pointless, the only info stored would be the logins of people who had completed the survey, and hence eligible to win the hundreds of pounds prize!!!

ooh, not that i'm suggesting the union should host it or anything, but www.su already contains all the functionality to do this - the only issue being how mySQL would cope with a table of potentially 10000 rows. (and i'm not bragging or anything) mySQL/PHP is probably less likely to suffer from the problems/outages described above. I'm currently rewriting an Oracle/AOLserver website in PHP/mySQL just because the oracle/aolserver combination on www.su sucks so much!

5. Dan L

Dec 03 2001 22:03

I just can't beleive what a mess the IC system currently is. Why don't they think for a minute, and then decided that they could get students to write it - after all it would be cheaper, and will work - something they seem unable to do.

One theory I have is that all the staff have paid IC not to get it working. That way, when the deadline on Friday is reached, there will be no bad comments against them, and nothing to follow up. Simple really!! Any ideas??

6. kevin

Dec 03 2001 23:11

A low tech approach ... everyone at a lecture writes the major point they learnt at the lecture and the item in the lecture that they thought was most poorly delt with on an anoymous slip.

These are collected - no lecturer even the most arrogant could resist reading them and hopefully would be able to start their next lecture with an improved explainations of areas shown up to be poorly understood by the slips. The information aqquired using the system would be made available to the union.

The above system is an example of current practice in many institutions - it provides simple good quality feed back to lecturers.

The aims of Imperial's LEQ system are however unlike the above entirely not student orientated. The system exists because the college is under a statatory requirement to collect data on a small number of questions such as what percentage of the lectures by Dr X did you attend?

What ICU should be ensuring is that if an electronic system is introduced to fulfil the college's legal obligations that students get some benifit from it too.

7. Dan L

Dec 04 2001 09:26

I can now inform everyone I have managed to get to the so far elusive screen, without an error message. Maybe it does work now?? Feedback please!!

8. Oliver Pell

Dec 04 2001 11:20

I've managed to get through to a page that asks me to select a lecturer...and then gives me a list of 0 lecturers to choose from...

9. Jason McKee

Dec 04 2001 11:46

Just a point on the use of College usernames to authenticate users of the LEQ system.

1. Some students have two College usernames (such as JMC students).

2. recent ex-students retain college usernames.

3. Not all College usernames are for students

As far as I can recall, there was a problem last year with ensuring each student could only complete a survey once, and that only students could complete it. The currect method ensures that students have exactly one login username / password. I for example, as an ex-student was not emailed a username to my College login account.

10. Dan L

Dec 04 2001 11:58

Well. Although I think the system is crap, I have just managed to submit my LEQ, and it appears to have worked!

11. Rob Dimond

Dec 04 2001 13:51

Well I don't get the error any more but apparently I have had no lectures this term. Perhaps it's an ISE thing and in that case another confirmation that I'm on a forgotten year of a forgotten course.

12. Richard

Dec 10 2001 18:32

We're back!

13. Alex

Jan 29 2002 23:55

<i>the cgcu intranet uses a perl login cheching script that authenticates against IC, DoC and Aero - so you could login via that, store the logins for all completed users in a mySQL table, to prevent repeated logins - and then all this stuff about passwords would be pointless, the only info stored would be the logins of people who had completed the survey, and hence eligible to win the hundreds of pounds prize!!!</i>

That would be far too easy.

Closed This discussion is closed.