“This is not meant to be scurrilous reporting—it just reinforces respect for the work tutors do,” he said.

Georgi also chose not to have Leverett House participate in the survey, saying that while each House might confront different circumstances, for Leverett the survey would do “more harm than good.”

He said he felt that the anonymous survey would destroy the “family atmosphere” in the House, and that both students and tutors bear responsibility in fostering a healthy relationship.

In an e-mail sent to House residents, Georgi urged students to contact their tutors directly, or alternately share concerns confidentially with him, his wife or Senior Tutor Catherine Shapiro.

Eliot House Master Lino Pertile said that although the tutor survey has its limitations, it is still a very valuable resource to provide feedback on tutors.

“It isn’t perfect, and I don’t think that it should be taken as the golden mean—the answer to all the questions—but it’s not the only one that is used to arrive to an improvement to what goes on in the Houses. It’s one of the many ways in which we try to understand student’s attitudes toward the tutors who are very close to them,” Pertile said.

He also said that assessing tutors is not so different from evaluating teaching fellows and professors on academic performance.

“I don’t think that there is anything extraordinary about the initiative—to have feed back for the masters and the tutors,” Pertile said.

But he also said that each House should be free to make its own decision on the surveys, and said that in Eliot the results have been both helpful and “very positive.”

—Staff writer Risheng Xu can be reached at xu4@fas.harvard.edu.