Editorial: UC Regents, students would benefit from detailed reports over letter grades

Students soon won’t be the only ones in the University of California system worrying about their grades.

The UC Student Association is planning to release a UC Regent Report Card, which will annually grade the performance of members of the UC Board of Regents based on their transparency and votes on issues that affect students, as well as how often they interact with students. UCSA intends on soliciting student responses for the metrics it will use to grade regents.

The motivations for the report card are apparent. Regents are the decision-makers of the UC, setting policies governing everything from adjudication for sexual assault to tuition increases. But students hardly know who these individuals are, and the regents themselves often have little face time with students.

UCSA should therefore expand its report card endeavor from an annual report to a constantly updated project that continuously tracks, evaluates and profiles individual regents on criteria relevant to students. It should also publish smaller reports after each bimonthly regents meeting to highlight committee votes and agenda items relevant to students.

An actual letter grade may not be needed for this report card to be effective. Many report card-style publications that pertain to education abuse the framework: They begin with a call to action, establish criteria that demonstrate the inadequacy of the current situation and assign some poor grade.

This is criticism disguised as evaluation. Grades in these situations are metaphorical bludgeons rather than refined assessment instruments. The goal of the regents’ report card ought not be to excoriate the regents, but to provide comprehensive detail of what they are doing and what their motivations are.

To accomplish this, UCSA could follow the example set by the Department of Education’s “College Scorecard,” which lets users pick and choose their own criteria to draw conclusions on how good of a fit a school is for them. Since many regents are politicians or businesspeople appointed by politicians, these models are particularly fitting.

UCSA could create a profile of all the regents’ relationships – financial, political or otherwise – to other regents, politicians and other power brokers in California. The evaluations could also display publicly available financial and campaign contribution data, and keep a running tally of where and when they have met with students, or any key UC constituency.

Doing so would not only allow for transparency in regents’ backgrounds, but also allow UCSA to better incentivize regents to interface with students. This is because approaching the report cards from a transparency- and policy-oriented standpoint would make the reports more worthwhile than just tired criticisms about how the regents don’t meet with students, and thereby better hold regents accountable.

Most importantly, doing so will force the regents to take notice of the report cards, and maybe think twice the next time they vote to raise tuition.