Evaluations now digital

The Committee on the Course of Study, chaired by Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel, has instituted an online system for all undergraduate course evaluations in an effort to increase the ease and efficiency of the end-of-semester process.

Students, who will no longer fill out paper forms in class, will not be able to view their grade for a given course until they have evaluated that course. Users can decline to evaluate, though “very few students actually select this option,” according to the Online Course Evaluation FAQ published by the committee.

Faculty are urged not to communicate grades to students before they submit evaluations to maintain the incentive and the feedback’s objectivity, which may be swayed after students know their grades.

“If faculty members inform students of their grades directly, those faculty members should be aware that students will be able to complete the online evaluation having already seen their final course grade,” the committee said in an e-mail sent to all faculty members.

The online evaluation differs substantively from the paper version in that it gives students the ability to separately evaluate multiple professors and preceptors for a single course.The online version has fewer questions overall.

“What we know about surveys is the more questions you ask, the less likely you’re going to get any of them completed,” University Registrar Polly Griffin said.

Some students, however, said they think that the condensed format does not allow for enough feedback.

“It doesn’t have a clear ‘what are your comments, other ideas’ section,” Gabriel Kreindler ’09 said, adding that “there’s one question on the lectures and not on precepts. On the written [version] these were separate, but now they’re not.”

The new format does, however, prompt students to give advice on how to improve courses. This feedback will later be made public and is intended to provide better public reviews than USG’s Student Course Guide (SCG), according to the Committee’s FAQ.

“Because the number of responses in the SCG is so small, one or two students can skew the distribution of responses,” according to the FAQ. “With the data we collect moving forward, the information shared with students will be much more accurate and useful.”

The plan to shift from paper to the internet was conceived when CollegeNET, a software vendor from which the University buys its classroom scheduling and calendaring programs, offered an online system for course evaluations, Griffin explained.The move to an online system will save 20,000 each of Scantron forms, narrative forms and golf pencils as well as the significant amount of manpower required for the manual system.

Some students also said that moving the evaluation process online may encourage them to respond to questions more honestly.

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“I feel like when you do [the evaluation] in a classroom with everyone, you’re not as likely to give honest responses, compared to when you’re in your dorm room,” Julia Xu ’11 said.

Despite the new system’s priority on maintaining anonymity, it won’t be able to remove all traces of a student’s identity.

“Being in really small classes, putting in information like class year makes it pretty clear who it is,” Violeta Banica ’09 said.