Ostensibly, these papers serve to assist the faculty in making changes to their course structure and teaching style. The extent to which this actually takes place is a little nebulous — I’ve had professors who claim to pore over each and every copy as well as those who say up front that they don’t even give them a glance.

Although a diligent professor certainly could benefit from student evaluations, however halfheartedly, there are others who would gain a great deal from them as well — specifically, students.

Now, MSU already has several means available for students to get an idea of a class before they take it. In addition to word of mouth and social networking, Koofers.com boasts a decent amount of student-submitted reviews for specific courses and faculty members as well as a multitude of supplemental material such as past quizzes and grade point average data.

However, sites like Koofers rely on voluntary student participation, a rather fickle resource. One could argue that, in general, students who take the trouble to post reviews online have either become great fans of a certain class or professor and want to share their success or suffer a disastrous semester about which they would like to complain. Sampling from the two extremes of the student experience spectrum may yield unreliable data.

The administration seems to have figured this out: By partitioning a few minutes of class time for their mandated evaluation forms, the university ensures that its information comes from a sufficiently large sample group. The forms are simple, and students have little reason to rush or lie. The numbers, one would imagine, reveal quite a bit of truth.

Unfortunately, students only can imagine what this normalized opinion might look like. They have no access to the real results.

Why? Why shouldn’t students be able to read what their peers have to say about Professor So-and-So and her level of enthusiasm with regard to the course material?

It would take a bit of time and effort, but constructing a Koofers-like website that incorporates information from official student evaluations could prove incredibly beneficial to students and advisers during course selection.

Admittedly, the knowledge that their opinions could end up online, even anonymously, could alter the way students fill out evaluation forms. Likewise, professors who write their own questions may be more guarded against inviting negative feedback, which is a necessary tool for revising a course’s structure.

Perhaps developing — I’m sorry, friends — an additional evaluation form, something brief and easy, with the expressed purpose of contributing to an Internet resource pool, would have a positive effect. Optional write-in comments, either on paper or online, could aid further in creating an unbiased, averaged and informative body of data.

The age of devising a schedule based merely on a class description has long since faded. University students have been scattered to the Internet winds, scouring their friends’ Facebook walls, social forums and sponsored websites for nuggets of insight into their potential professors and courses.

Now is the time to gather everyone together in one place and use the materials we already have. Those other portals always will be there, but a central repository for frankness and earned opinion would be a welcome oasis in today’s uncertain academic environment.

Either that or everyone needs to be a lot better about logging on to Koofers, because I’m having a tough time planning my schedule for 2012.

Craig Pearson is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at pears153@msu.edu