One on-campus community I’m involved in is the freshman orientation program. Orientation Leaders serve as mentors for the incoming students over the summer before their freshman year and the first week of their Cornell life. To be a good mentor, it is imperative that you have a good relationship with your mentees. To me, a good mentor-mentee relationship consists of mutual trust, responsibility, amount and reliability of knowledge and information, kindness and sensitivity.
There are many different kinds of OLs, since there are, on average, 700+ OLs for any given August Orientation. Everyone’s values are different, and therefore every student’s orientation experience will be different. Since there is no reputation system or evaluation process for freshmen, “bad” – by which I mean irresponsible and unreliable – OLs will go undetected. Since many OLs re-apply for the position year after year, and are more likely to be chosen based on their prior experience, it is a good idea to have a reputation system.
I think the system should have two parts; feedback from incoming students and feedback from friends. Each member of an OL’s group and several close friends should rate the OL on the categories of trustworthiness, responsibility, knowledgeability, reliability, kindness, and sensitivity. The highest rating should be green, followed in order by blue, yellow, orange, and red. An OL with a rating of green or blue would be a reputable OL; yellow would be neutral; orange and red would be disreputable. Hopefully the institution of a reputation system would force OLs to take their responsibilities more seriously because they would know they are being reported on since, as Resnick et. al. state, "an expectation that people will consider one another’s pasts in future interactions constrains behavior in the present."
In addition, the Orientation Steering Committee members and Orientation Supervisors are selected from previous OLs. As stated by Olson, “if higher degrees of trust can be established, organizations can work more efficiently, and adapt more quickly to changing circumstances” (p. 135). A rating system would make sure that those in charge of running the Orientation Program and those that are in charge of ensuring a positive and nurturing orientation experience for incoming students are truly committed and suited to such a task, and make sure that the best people are consistently selected for the task.
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This system would certainly be effective, so long as the participants were candid with their feedback. You run into a problem because the OL's friends may not rate the OL accurately, given social pressures. Even if their feedback is nameless, they may still feel obliged, leading to somewhat inflated results The freshman students may be more likely to rate the OL highly, but many freshman may rate the OL high because they took them to parties and whatnot. This is the kind of behavior the OSC tries to eradicate, but they would be misled by the high marks.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting system, but I don't know if the friend-rating component is as relevant as the group-rating component. Since this is a system designed to rate how good of an orientation leader a person is, and not how good of a person in general they are, the friend ratings might end up skewing the data more than providing a more accurate representation. Reading Eric's comment above also rings true. Actual behavior of freshmen may differ than what's expected because outside factors are inherent in the choices they make.
ReplyDeleteThis system seems like it would be successful, however I wonder if they're friends would be inclined to give them a better rating- they might have a biased opinion. This would be a manipulation of the system.
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