When filling out course evaluations at the end of the quarter, you may want to think twice about ignoring that space for comments at the bottom of the form.

What you write there will be the biggest help to other students; these comments are posted on the ASSU Course Guide — a free resource for students to look up summaries and ratings for classes.

While the Course Guide has been notorious in past years for providing incomplete and outdated information, the students in charge said they are making a greater effort to enter comments into the database in a more timely fashion, especially as they prepare for a brand new system that will allow students to write their comments online instead of on paper forms.

The Course Guide staff has recruited the assistance of members of the Cap and Gown women’s honor society who are donating the money they make working for the guide to their group. Also, the Tau Beta Pi engineering honors society enters comments from engineering classes.

The staff spent the summer catching up on entering comments, and evaluations from this past fall’s classes were entered into the system last weekend.

Yet while the staff is updating the Web site more frequently, Course Guide Director Curtis Spencer, a graduate student in computer science, said he sees larger problems in the framework of the Course Guide.

Spencer said that most students never write any comments in their course evaluations, especially since the number of students attending the final classes “usually tapers off due to stress associated with finals.” In addition, many courses are televised and students don’t make an effort to come to the final class.

“There needs to be a way to encourage more students to fill out comments,” Spencer said.

The Course Guide staff is trying to engineer the system to resemble the one used by Stanford Dining, Residential Education and Undergraduate Advising. These groups entice students to fill out their surveys with gift certificates and other prizes.

“[The prizes are] a small price to pay for the huge increase in the number of comments they receive,” Spencer said. “In addition, an online system eliminates the problems associated with manual data entry such as human error, sorting and costs.”

Work on the new system is set to begin early next quarter and the staff’s goal is to have it up and running by the end of fall quarter.

But members of the staff will need some help from Axess coordinators to post the course evaluations online. That way, only students registered for classes can comment on them. The current paper-to-Web system requires an overwhelming amount of time and effort from the Course Guide staffers, who are compensated $14 per hour for their work.

The staff receives multiple boxes of course comment slips, and each box requires approximately 40 hours of work to sort, read and type the comments into the database.

However, because students often do not fill out the forms completely, there are bundles of blank slips and many classes go unrepresented in guide.

“It doesn’t make sense to enter one comment for a class — it would be a very biased comment and would not appropriately represent the course in most cases,” said sophomore Aditi Iyer, the chief financial officer. “Unfortunately, we lack comments more often than not, [which is] another reason Course Guide is not up-to-date much of the time.”

The Course Guide relies solely on these comment slips and does not receive the numerical ratings based what students bubble-in about professors and class content.

“I guess the main incentive to write a short comment is knowing that you might want to look on Course Guide someday and that you would like it to actually have constructive comments about the classes you are interested in,” Iyer said.

Similar course feedback resources exist at other universities, including the University of California, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. While the Stanford administration has not played a direct role in ensuring a quality Course Guide, they do support the effort the students’ effort to create one.

“The Registrar’s Office provides information to the ASSU regarding evaluations,” said University Registrar Roger Printup. “It is the ASSU’s responsibility to then publish the Guide. The Faculty Senate has supported the provision of course evaluation data to the ASSU for the purpose of producing the Guide.”

Even so, some students said they have lost faith in the Course Guide as a valuable resource.

“I checked the Course Guide at the beginning of fall quarter and it wasn’t updated at all,” said sophomore Johan Surani. “The comments were backlogged from a few years ago. But the guide was still pretty useful for providing more personal information about the professors’ teaching styles.”