At the end of every semester, students swarm to the anonymous campus-based social media platform Yik Yak with the same question: Why is James Cart ’05 so obsessed with me?

“Bruh james cart just wants me so bad,” one user wrote in December. The post received 36 upvotes. 

“james cart returning made my day,” another posted (34 upvotes). 

“What james Cart gonna do when he realizes the reason I’m not going to fill out my course surveys is so I keep on getting his emails?” a third chimed in (14 upvotes). 

Cart is the College’s assistant director of Institutional Research — but to students, he’s better known as the familiar name that reappears in their inbox at the end of every semester. His constant reminders, many stuffed with corny Gen Z lingo, urge students to complete the Student Course Survey (SCS), a digital form used to evaluate professors and courses at every semester’s close.

In some emails, Cart will clue you in on his post-work schedule. “After incessantly checking and rechecking, downloading and updating spreadsheets and reports over the last two weeks, overshooting email quotas set by Google — I will relax tonight, mix a frosty beverage, and let the purple vibes lead my feet to a rug cutting dazzle display,” reads a characteristically zealous email from May. 

He often ribs himself: “Let me say I’m sorry. My emails haven’t been that great, and they’ve been far too frequent. I don’t blame you for prioritizing other facets of your life,” reads another from a few years back.

Although Cart doesn’t check Yik Yak, he’s well aware that he’s a household name on the site.

“I’ve met students through various things on campus, I’ll introduce myself, and I’ll see this recognition most of the time,” he said in an interview with the Record. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re the email guy.’ Or, ‘Wait, you’re real? I didn’t even know you were real.’” 

As a part of his role, which he has held since 2017, Cart manages the College’s institutionally mandated surveys — the SCS, annual surveys of graduating seniors, and biennial surveys of enrolled students — and helps bring others conducted by outside vendors, such as the HEDS Consortium, to the College. 

Though Cart has always been concerned with maximizing response rates, his recent pushes, following a dip in SCS participation, have earned him some campus notoriety.

The Faculty voted to adopt the SCS in 1972 and made it mandatory in 1988. Originally, the survey was administered on paper forms, which faculty would give to their students at the end of the semester. Response rates for the paper forms were very high: When Cart assumed his role less than a decade ago, they typically hovered between 90 and 93 percent, he said. 

But using paper forms also came with downsides. If a professor forgot to hand out the SCS to students in class, there was no way to collect survey responses, leaving the professor without any data points for their course. The anonymity of paper surveys also meant there was no way to collect the demographics of respondents to determine if the pool was representative of the student body. And sometimes, Cart said, students would mistakenly fill out a survey for the wrong professor, using an extra paper form left in a classroom from the class before.

“There were small inaccuracies that could potentially have a large effect on the individual faculty member,” Cart explained, noting that even a single false data point could massively skew a professor’s results in low-enrollment courses — potentially affecting tenure decisions, for which the SCS plays an important role.

“Also, personally, I was sick and tired of dealing with all of the paper,” Cart quipped.

Several ad hoc committees met throughout the 2000s and 2010s to reimagine the SCS, culminating in the debut of a shorter, online survey in the fall of 2019. Response rates suffered.

Though Institutional Research recommends that faculty set aside class time for students to complete the online survey, some no longer do, as students can technically complete the survey from their computer at any time during the last week of classes. This is one reason Cart believes the response rate, which now sits between 70 and 80 percent, has dropped since the introduction of the online survey. 

That’s where Cart’s reminders come in. 

Over the last five years, he’s developed a strategy: The SCS goes live for students on the Monday of the penultimate week of classes, but he waits until the last day of classes to send his first email to students, giving faculty the opportunity to leave class time for students to fill out the survey. The first email is what Cart described as a “professional reminder,” but in the days to follow, he fills students’ inboxes with several more messages that take on the increasingly zany tone many have come to expect.

In May 2022, he included a poem: “Evaluations / a haiku made just for you / please please please do them.” The following spring, he went for a more earnest approach: “Your sincere, considered feedback is appreciated. Like, super appreciated.” 

And in December 2024, Cart put his anxieties on full display with a 500-word, slang-riddled plea: “My efforts have historically been equal parts strange/dated/sincere/self-deprecating/simp/rent-free, and dare I say some of them slap.”

“They’ve probably gotten a little sillier over the years,” Cart told the Record. “I can get students to see that email and think, ‘Oh, this might be worth a chuckle. I’ll read it, and maybe I’ll even evaluate a course or take a survey.’ I don’t have much to offer besides that.”

Each email is a labor of love. The longer ones can take over an hour to craft, Cart said, and he often consults his 13- and 15-year-old daughters for feedback. But despite the effort he has poured into email-writing over the years, Cart said that it’s hard to know whether they have made any meaningful difference in the response rate, given how many other factors could affect whether a student fills out the survey.

“It’s just more who I am to write silly stuff as opposed to the straight-up, ‘Please fill this out, it’s important,’” he said.

According to Cart, Institutional Research has considered employing a variety of incentives to increase survey responses — withholding grades from students until they have finished their course evaluations, for instance — but it has yet to pull the trigger.

“One of the concerns about incentives is whether it will decrease the validity of the data,” Cart said, adding that Institutional Research strongly discourages using incentives in any College survey. 

“There’s strong evidence that, if you’re intrinsically motivated to fill it out, we’ll have better quality data,” he continued. “We don’t need everyone to fill it out — we just need a representative sample of people to fill it out, and ideally we want people who are invested in what we’re trying to do beforehand.”

Still, Cart acknowledged that there have been “a ton more surveys” in recent years, and he didn’t rule out the use of incentives in the future, especially for other institutionally mandated surveys, which can take 20 minutes or more to complete.

“No matter how funny my email is,” Cart said, “I don’t expect everyone to fill them out.”