“The department was ready for a change,” English Undergraduate Program Administrator Jeffrey Berg said. “I think there was a general encouragement across the College to examine what we were doing in each department.”

English Department Chair W. James Simpson said that support from FAS Dean Michael D. Smith provided a framework to continue improving undergraduate education.

“I think it is due to an increasing emphasis [on teaching and learning],” Simpson said. “Certainly Dean Smith has helped.... The University administration worked very collaboratively in restructuring the department.”

Some departments saw minor decreases in their satisfaction scores since the last academic year, including classics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and History and Literature, but these departments constituted an anomaly in the FAS-wide trend.

Many of the departments that experienced decreases in their satisfaction ratings are smaller, and therefore are more likely to see fluctuations from year to year.

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Sirui Li can be reached at sli@college.harvard.edu.