In the midst of finishing projects and cramming for exams, thousands of University students became frustrated last Monday night when CTools and the online teaching evaluations shut down.

Though the technological error occurred over a week ago, University officials still do not have answers as to why or how it happened.

At Monday's meeting of the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs, John King, vice provost for academic information, said the University is investigating what went wrong.

“There’s a very major effort going on right now to find out exactly what caused this and that will obviously get fixed,” King said.

King said he believes that the CTools website was extremely overloaded at the time of the crash, and that the website couldn't handle all of the functional tools that were added to CTools over time.

“We have added so much functionality, at the request of the units, to both CTools and these other things, that we got beyond our own confidence in our ability to test the system at run time,” he said.

King added that another factor may have been the faculty’s ability to manage the website.

“Giving faculty members control of the teaching evaluation apparatus — even relatively moderate control — is part of the problem that can cloud the issues,” he said.

King indicated that in the future, the University might have to implement new rules concerning the faculty’s power to monitor the site.

“Probably what we’re going to have to have is an agreed upon set of protocols that people follow and then an agreed upon behavior of the system that stays with those protocols,” he said.

Professors received completed teaching evaluations submitted by students before 9 p.m. last Monday, when the system crashed. University officials decided not to reopen the teaching evaluations after CTools was working again Tuesday morning.

King said some students would have received their grades by then, which could have influenced their responses in the survey.

“From a policy perspective, the issue of not collecting the evaluations after grades have been posted has been discussed, and it’s understood that’s not anything anyone intends to do,” King said.

Despite the screw-up, officials are confident the online evaluation system first implemented last fall is just as efficient as the paper evaluation system.

King said the number of completed online evaluations in fall 2008 was similar to the amount filled out on paper in fall 2007.

“In the fall term, evaluation results were remarkably similar to the fall of last year in terms of the number of data collected and in terms of what the evaluations showed,” he said.

Nonetheless, many students were aggravated that they couldn't evaluate the teaching styles and performances of their professors and GSIs this semester.

LSA freshman Sara Schafrann didn’t have time to fill out the questionnaires before the system shut down. She said she felt frustrated about the situation because she wanted to give positive feedback to her favorite professors.

“I loved my sociology professor, and I wish I could have given him a good comment,” she said.

LSA sophomore Kristen Krause said she didn’t get the chance to express her disapproval of the way her GSIs taught her classes.

“I was kind of upset we didn’t get to do them because I felt like I couldn’t give my constructive criticism to some of my GSIs,” she said.

Expressing her distrust of technology, Krause said she would have rather filled out paper evaluations like the University has provided in the past.

The technological error not only prevented students from critiquing professors, but it negatively impacted some students’ grades.

LSA freshman Brittany Matson lost four points in Biology 172 that were given for filling out the evaluations.