Results of new online course evaluations released

Courses in the humanities received the highest ratings, with 91 percent of respondents rating the overall quality of their courses excellent, very good or good. Positive ratings comprised 86 percent of student responses for engineering courses and 85 percent of evaluations for both natural science and social science courses.

This year marked the first time that undergraduates completed their course evaluations online rather than during class time. In previous years, students completed written evaluations during the last class of the semester.

Ninety-seven percent of students completed the online evaluations, including 13 percent of students who formally declined to participate. The response rate was up significantly from the roughly 60 percent completion rate of previous years, Registrar Polly Griffin said in an e-mail.

As an incentive for students to complete the online forms, students who failed to complete course evaluations were blocked from viewing their final grades until Feb. 9. Most students complied, as only 118 undergraduates and 68 graduate students experienced the delay.

Faculty members were similarly encouraged to submit their grades in a timely manner, as professors were unable to view their course evaluations until they submitted students’ final grades.

The threat of withheld grades was “definitely an incentive” for Julie Nkodo ’12.

“I check my grades like every five minutes, so I [completed the course evaluations] as soon as possible,” she said.

Initial student reaction to the new course evaluation process has been positive: Griffin said that she has personally received several positive messages from students. Kameron Knab ’12 said that reviewing course evaluations online was interesting. “I liked how [the results] were presented,” he said, adding that they were “easy to understand.”

The system of online evaluations was an improvement over the old process, Brianna Moreno ’09 said, because “you were able to give a little more detail since you weren’t rushing to get out of class.”

This added detail can be particularly useful to faculty. Politics professor Kosuke Imai said that he will try to improve his course, POL 345: Quantitative Analysis and Politics, in the future based on student comments.

“The more complete comments are, the more useful,” he noted.

While the online evaluations prompted students to provide written feedback about the content, structure and method of instruction, only the “feedback for other students” section was made available to students online. This policy apparently was not clear to all students when completing the evaluations, as one student responded to the “feedback for other students” section for EEB 211: The Biology of Organisms with “(See Above).”

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Students had mixed reactions to the withholding of some responses. Nana Young ’12 said that she approves of the policy, since specific sections were intended “for the professor to improve.”

Knab said he agreed. “The comments from the student to the professor should be between the student and the professor,” he said.

Nkodo, however, said she was less comfortable with the policy of partial disclosure. “What were they trying to hide?” she asked.