The Student Government Association met Wednesday, Sept. 19, for the third time this year. Among the topics of discussion were a new amendment to SGA’s constitution and the possibility of a new student website for evaluating-and criticizing-professors.

Parks College Senator Sean Flanagan, a senior, proposed an amendment to SGA’s constitution; it was almost identical to an amendment had already been passed last year.

“The university server went down over summer, and we were able to recover most of the missing things, but what we weren’t able to locate was the minutes that were taken,” Flanagan said. The final wording of the amendment from last year was also lost in the crash.

Flanagan said that he tried his best to recreate the amendment, even consulting members of last year’s constitutional review committee.

Per normal procedure, debate on the amendment was tabled until next week. The senate will consider the proposal again on Wednesday, Sept. 26.

Another topic of discussion was a website called Pick-a-Prof, which Academic Vice President Tyler Brownfield spoke about. The website began in 2000 at Texas A&M University and is currently used by more than 350 colleges and universities. Brownfield became interested in the website over the summer.
Pick-a-Prof, similar to ratemyprofessor.com, enables students to rate teachers and to make and view comments about them. Some schools-especially public universities-also allow the website to publish statistics on how the professors grade, even including the percentage of A’s they rewarded in past years. Brownfield said that SLU’s version of the website would probably not include this feature.

According to Brownfield, Pick-a-Prof will have more profanity monitoring than ratemyprofessor.com.

“It’s pretty simple, and it looks a lot cleaner [than ratemyprofessor.com],” Brownfield said. “Most of the ratings were somewhat harsh but fairly honest.”

Brownfield hopes that the website is taken advantage of so that it becomes a useful tool for SLU students.

“If we see that it is something that could be useful on campus, then we will bring it back to [SGA],” Brownfield said.

Also during the meeting, Mark Franke, a second-year medical school student, was seated as the medical school senator.