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It's the end of the academic year in the U.S., and that means it's time for course evaluations. Course evaluations are controversial little beasts, and both student and faculty bloggers have plenty to say about them. Herein I share some of their laments and offer some tips on conducting a course (or program) evaluation that's really meaningful.
Lauren expresses a concern that professors won't look at course evaluations, particularly for large lecture courses where they don't interact much with students. She also worries about the timing of course evaluations:
The timing of the evaluations is not chosen wisely. At the end of a semester students are just finalizing their last projects, tests, and papers. Grades for the most part have already been determined. Why would a student care about shedding light on a professor’s inadequacies when nothing they say will better the experience they will take from the class. The class is over; any complaints will just be a waste of time and energy. Evaluations should be a dynamic process that is available to students throughout the suration of the class. Feedback should be always provided to the instructor if a class if to be effective.
It is possible for professors to ignore course evaluations, which is too bad, because in my experience there's usually something there--a thoughtful critique or an expression of gratitude for a job well done--that makes them worth a read.
I agree with Lauren that the timing of course evaluations is bad: at the end of the term, everyone is tired and it can be hard to motivate students to take the time to write something meaningful on the evaluations. Worse, students' grades in the class often influence their opinion of a professor's skills. So if a student learns that she is getting a C in a course, it's likely--unless the professor is truly exceptional--that she will perceive the professor as below average. It's entirely possible that the professor in this example is below average--perhaps she couldn't teach the students well enough for them to earn As, or she wrote tests that didn't accurately assess what students were supposed to be learning in the course, or her grading methods were unfair. It's also possible that this professor is a pretty good instructor--but we won't necessarily know that by looking at end-of-course evaluations because these assessments tend to be colored by (a) a student's grade and (b) whether or not a student likes the professor's personality.
Craig Monk, a faculty member, dislikes the anonymity of student evaluations of faculty:
If you have a problem with a course and the way it is taught, you should always talk to the instructor about it while the course is ongoing. I have never understood why students fear reprisals in such a situation. How is it that we dignify such suspicions by structuring a whole system to protect people from something we only assume might happen? If a student with a complaint was ever somehow punished for complaining, mechanisms already exist to investigate and reverse any manner of asymmetrical treatment of individuals in the classroom. If the problem cannot be resolved, ultimately, if it is the kind of thing that should be reflected in a course evaluation, it is the principled thing to do to sign that evaluation, even though the instructor will not (and should not) see that signature.
It is my personal opinion, and only my personal opinion, that we should always require signatures. If we are going to say things about people, we should have to put our names to those things. We should send our students out into the world respecting the power of their opinions and better respecting those people on whom those opinions are brought to bear.
I'm not sure I need to have students sign their course evaluations, but it would be nice to see, in the aggregate, whether positive evaluations in my course correlated to high grades and more reserved evaluations associated with lower grades. I think anonymity is especially important in the case of students majoring in a discipline who may have the same professor again. Monk suggests student signatures should be removed from the evaluations faculty see, but there's a danger that evaluations to "leak" into the hands of the professor or her colleagues, thus jeopardizing students' right to comment freely without fear of reprisal in future courses.
The departments where I have worked have allowed us
