Depending on the University administration’s findings, students may participate in an updated course evaluation process in the near future.
The administration is assembling a work group to review the process that allows students to rate their experiences with professors and courses, sources said. The evaluations, which currently take the form of scanned bubble forms or short-answer question sheets, are used to give feedback to instructors and help administrators make decisions about professors’ tenure.
Professors’ numeric scores on four of the questions are made available to the public on the Office of Academic Affairs’ Web site, academicaffairs.uoregon.edu, through a link at the bottom of the page. Students can review the scores for a course or professor when making decisions during course registration periods, but many aren’t aware of the site’s existence.
Russell Tomlin, linguistics professor and vice provost for academic affairs, said while he didn’t feel problems with the evaluation process are widespread, he is interested in researching ways it could be improved.
“We use student evaluations as an important part of the evaluation of faculty,” Tomlin said, adding that it’s important to create a process that’s statistically valid and reliable.
Tomlin, who is directing the University’s review effort, is still looking to add a student member to the work group, and cautioned that it’s still early in the process to predict what conclusions the group will draw.
“What we do is decent; it’s not stunning,” Tomlin said. He added that he believes students and faculty are, in general, content with the process but will appreciate efforts to improve it.
The evaluations currently examine a particular instructor in a particular department for one term.
“That’s useful, but it doesn’t tell much about how (an instructor) did, compared with the rest of the University,” Tomlin said.
The statistics are sensitive to the size of the course and level of response, Tomlin said. In addition, scores for courses needed to fulfill major requirements are often
“more sensitive.”
The work group may look for a way to
allow students to fill out evaluation forms from home on the Internet, Tomlin said, although an away-from-class evaluation would likely require countermeasures to ensure student response rates don’t dip.
Ray King, accounting professor and senior associate dean of the Lundquist College of Business, said the business school is interested in conducting the evaluations online as well.
“There are some universities that have done this,” King said. “We’re looking at what they’ve done.”
There are a variety of different practices among academic departments when it comes to evaluation style and content.
“The student evaluation of teaching has evolved over time,” King said, adding that the business school uses its own form for evaluations and rates professors on a slightly different scale. “I think we paid attention to (the evaluation process) earlier. As a consequence, we made mistakes and discovered things sooner.”
Senior Aaron Woods said he believes the student course evaluation process favors instructors.
“A lot of kids are still scared that if they’re honest on an evaluation, it’ll get back to them,” Woods said.
He said students who drop a class aren’t included in the statistics, leaving room for error.
“If somebody drops a class because they don’t like that teacher, they’re not filling out an evaluation form,” Woods said, adding that those students could pull teachers’ averages down if they’re counted.
Woods recommended exit surveys for students who drop, making the evaluations easier to find online and publishing a greater number of questions. He added that he speaks to his friends about an instructor before he signs up for a class, a time-honored tradition among college students that has now found a place online with Web sites like ratemyprofessors.com, a site
that allows students to post feedback about teachers on online bulletin boards.
Tomlin said he hopes to make the evaluation process effective enough that students use it rather than talking among themselves or looking for ratings on independent Web sites. Those sources may produce ratings from only those who hold extremely high or low opinions of professors, missing opinions from the bulk of students.
The University’s effort to improve the evaluations will be a two-part process. Tomlin said he hopes to complete the conceptual phase of the project by the end of spring term at a total cost of roughly $3,000 to $5,000. The second part of the project, implementation, could be more expensive, depending on the changes that are approved.

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