For years, the Student Government Association has tried to establish a successful way to gather, tabulate and distribute faculty course ratings. While it has not yet declared success, the new technology offered by the Web portal life.slu.edu may offer its best chance yet for success.

Near the end of each semester, students fill out evaluations in each class, but those evaluations are not released to the student body. Instead, departments use those evaluations to determine tenure and evaluate professors.

For several years, SGA worked to get this data released. Lubna Alam, academic vice president of SGA, has discussed this option with administrators but said it is not acceptable to the faculty.

Throughout the years, SGA has attempted to collect its own data. While the online process over the past few semesters netted several thousand responses, the courses had only one or two students rate each course, Alam explained.

Working in conjunction with the staff at life.slu.edu, Alam hopes to launch a Web-based system that would know which courses a student was taking the minute he or she logged into the system.

Brian Rodgers, technical director of life.slu.edu, will be writing the program for the faculty course ratings and hopes to make it easy to use for all students.

The goal is to have the system working by the end of the spring semester.

With the new program, Rodgers said that the results will be immediate, removing the need for manual tabulation, as the system will be able to know exactly what courses each student is taking.

Alam admits the most difficult part is always getting people to actually go to the Web site and submit their data. She hopes that by making it more user-friendly, students will realize that their contribution benefits everyone.