At the end of every term, students diligently take up pencils to fill out Scantron and essay course evaluations as professors duck outside classroom doors. The most pleased, peeved or just gutsy students sign their names at the bottom of the essays, allowing them to be attached to professors’ files. The forms indicate the evaluations will be available at a central location.
This evaluation procedure has become routine. Yet how many students take advantage of checking out evaluations before deciding to take a course?
Course evaluations are a vital aspect of the education experience, giving students some idea of what to expect from professors and allowing instructors to tailor their classes to students’ needs. The University should be commended for compiling this information. But we suspect that for many students, course evaluations simply don’t factor into academic decisions because they don’t know evaluations are available or where to find them.
Foremost, the evaluations are not well publicized. After years of attending classes, we were surprised when a search of the University’s Web site revealed that they are posted online. We could not, however, find a way to navigate to the evaluations through the University’s main page.
The online evaluations are only updated through winter 2005. Thus, they don’t necessarily reflect recent changes instructors have made to courses.
Although the Web site lists the number of evaluations submitted for each class, it doesn’t state the sample size. It says something about a class if only 10 of 100 people submit an application, but there is no way to discern this ratio. Instructors generally take for granted that all of their students fill out evaluations because the process takes place during class time. However, there is no way of knowing whether all the students present actually fill out an evaluation, and it is rare that every student enrolled in a class – especially in larger classes – shows up for lecture.
The University’s official evaluations aren’t the only tool available to students. The commercial Web site RateMyProfessors.com allows students to write comments about professors and to rank them on categories including easiness, helpfulness, clarity and “hotness.”
Evaluations are available for 732 University professors, according to the Web site.
This site provides more colloquial and colorful accounts about professors, but it seems more geared toward finding easy professors than quality instructors. Also, because it is a completely at-will service, there is no way of discerning the percentage of students that are posting comments.
And as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and professor of linguistics Russell Tomlin told the Emerald, RateMyProfessors.com does not provide a large sample of students. A few student comments can make up an entire rating.
To better serve students, we recommend that the University make responses to more questions available online, update the statistics more quickly and clearly advertise the online evaluations.