In spring 2017, a University of Oregon professor developed a group to reimagine student evaluations. Now, UO is putting it into action.
The midterm and end-of-term surveys have been updated with three important inputs in the evaluation: student feedback, instructor reflection, and peer review. The new program has goals to “ensure teaching evaluation is fair and transparent, is conducted against criteria aligned with the unit’s definition of teaching excellence, and include input from students, peers and the faculty themselves.” 

Bill Harbaugh, a UO economics professor and long time faculty senator, decided to develop the group to shift student evaluations, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education, based on consistent trends in previous course evaluations, such as female instructors receiving systemically lower course evaluations. 

Harbaugh worked with two UO students to study the relationship between student evaluations and grade inflation. 

“It replicates what many, many other people found,” Harbaugh said. “But to see it at my own university, I sort of felt like I had to do something about it.” 

Beginning in the 2019-20 academic year, UO adopted new practices for student course evaluations. The Teaching Engagement Program and Office of the Provost have been key in developing the new Student Experience Surveys for midterm and end of term reviews, according to Jason Schreiner.

Schreiner, who is the associate director of the teaching engagement program at UO, said that before the student evaluation surveys had a series of about six open ended questions. Students would then rate those questions on a five-point scale, which Schreiner said “doesn’t provide much meaning for anybody,” and then could add comments if they wanted to. 
“What’s different about this is that the questions are very specific,” Schreiner said. “It asks students very specific things, like how was the inclusivity of this course, how was the accessibility, how was the relevance. It provides students with a little bit of focus, and students can indicate that it was beneficial to their learning, neutral or wasn’t beneficial.” 
Initial pilot programs of the new Student Evaluation Stories indicated higher response rates. However, after the university officially launched the program in fall 2019, response rates dropped significantly. Austin Hocker, the assistant director of research and assessment reported that several reasons might explain this drop, including the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Another reason might be that the registrar’s grade-hold policy was removed, so there was no longer a negative incentive for students to complete their surveys in order to access their grades earlier. Lastly, the availability of surveys decreased; historically, surveys were open from Wednesday of week nine until 7 a.m. the Monday of finals week. Due to technology issues, the availability was reduced to Monday through Friday of finals week. 

Regardless, Schreiner said that the number of student comments expressing bias or offensive attacks on faculty has decreased. 

“We know from research over many years, student evaluations are notoriously biased against women and instructors of color,” Schreiner said. “That was a key thing driving the change.” 

The new program also allows for instructors to complete a reflection survey, where they write their own comments about the course. Instructors look at feedback from students, and they can provide their reflections about student’s comments and help clarify them. 

“The instructor can learn from what they hear from students and make changes and adjustments to future courses,” Schreiner said. “And when it comes time to review instructors, they use both what students say and what instructors say as a way to determine, ‘Is there a need for improvement here? Should I renew this career faculty’s contract?’ things like that.” 
UO’s new system has become a national model for Student Evaluation Surveys and has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education and by the National Academies of Sciences. 

Schreiner said that as the Teaching Engagement Program’s mission is to promote teaching excellence on campus, faculty should have an incentive to adopt research-based practices and better teaching practices. 

“By having an actual teaching evaluation system that’s based on research, and that is aligned with the kind of practices we know work well in classrooms, then suddenly now they have an incentive to adopt more inclusive teaching practices,” Schreiner said. “Whereas before, faculty might be like, ‘Well that all sounds good, but I don’t have time for that, that’s not what I’m rewarded on.’”