Frustration can be inspiring. How many disappointing professors in required courses must a student take before seeking a remedy? Apparently quite a few, for the problem of holding low-performing professors accountable to students remains unresolved.

Students are graded throughout the course of any given semester at least two times: one midterm, one final. We are held accountable to these grades by job recruiters, graduate schools and fellowship boards.

Why then, are professors evaluated only come semester-end and why do students not have easy access to those scores?

Let’s take the example of a professor of mine who has under-whelmed my classmates and me in almost every respect.

Less than half the class even bothers to show up anymore, yet no one objects to this professor’s vastly low standards because many of us are willing to accept an easy “A” and those with higher standards don’t want to raise the issue for fear of retribution.

Under the current faculty review system, this professor will continue to dissatisfy students in the fall semester, likely get reassigned to teach the course for the spring semester and have students unknowingly register in his section before evaluations are ever conducted.

Even if the professor receives appallingly low scores in December reviews, the registrar and dean’s offices likely wouldn’t receive them until the course was already underway in January. It would then take another full semester for the system to determine if any changes the professor may have made were successful — once again only after staffing decisions had already been made for the following semester.

Georgetown needs to take a serious look at its current evaluation system for faculty and begin to make changes that will empower students to monitor the quality of their own education.

By giving students easy online access to course reviews, and introducing a new system of mid-semester professor evaluations, the administration will, at very little cost, create a low maintenance method of protecting the high academic standards students expect on the Hilltop.

When I joined the Georgetown community, a new student advisor pointed me in the direction of The Hoya’s online course review, a service that has sadly been ignored and allowed to fall into obsolescence.

What that course review did was give students the basic facts about a particular class or professor: average overall score from a particular term, average hours of homework per week, etc.

While the introduction of online syllabi (when posted) has diminished the value of some aspects of this old system, the need for a student-accessible professor evaluation system remains.

Rather than rely on the student media to do the dirty work of organizing and presenting the compiled results of evaluations, the registrar should take on the responsibility of ensuring transparency in faculty performance.

The free market effect of students flocking to high scoring classes and abandoning those which have disappointed in the past would both give the university the impulse to replace underperforming professors and provide the pretense for why it must happen.

The system I propose is not so complicated. Integrate previously compiled course and professor rating information onto the registrar’s course listings system, in more or less the same fashion online syllabi have already been added.

Institute an online mid-semester review to measure faculty performance along the same metrics used for the traditional paper-based system (overall performance, preparation for class, whether exams fairly match course content, etc) before registration occurs.

While I recognize this mid-semester data, because it is optional, may attract outlier students with extreme opinions who are willing to take the time to fill out the evaluation, it is nonetheless valuable input for the professor.

As students begin to rely upon this data when choosing courses for themselves, they will feel greater responsibility to the rest of the community to evaluate their own professors.

If Georgetown hopes to have a chance of regaining lost ground in university rankings and hang onto a spot in the top 25, a lot of changes are going to have to take place on this campus. Creating a pool of satisfied alumni is crucial to its long-term success. Only if students feel they are gaining more than their $43,000 worth of education each year will they be inspired to give back as alumni.

Putting critical professor review data at students’ fingertips will give them much greater control over their education, and ultimately their satisfaction.

Mitch Fox is a senior in the McDonough School of Business and is the Business Manager of The Hoya.