Each term, students apply their pencils to multiple-choice bubble forms to evaluate their instructors. These course evaluations help professors and graduate teaching fellows improve their teaching and provide a basis for others to review their performance, faculty and GTFs said.
“I find them quite helpful,” said English Professor Warren Ginsberg, who also directs the English department. “Everybody I’ve talked to, which is just about everybody in the department, pays a good deal of attention to them.”
Many students also take course evaluations seriously.
“It’s just nice to have the knowledge of what students think,” senior Ricky Chen said.
The Office of the Registrar offers results from course evaluations on its Web site at http://courseevals.uoregon.edu/evals.cfm.
The results of four questions listed on course evaluations — which evaluate the course, instructor, efficiency or lack of efficiency in the use of class time and availability of the instructor outside of class time — are rated on a numerical scale.
Several faculty members said course evaluations are routinely used to assess the performance of professors when considering raises, tenure and promotions.
“Teaching is always taken into account, and course evaluations are part of that,” Ginsberg said.
Sociology GTF Nick Lougee said course evaluations are particularly important for graduate students who want to become professors because they weigh more in a hiring decision if a school doesn’t have a graduate school of its own.
“Most of the jobs are in schools without graduate schools, so it ends up being pretty important,” he said.
Lougee said he pays attention to students’ comments.
“Sometimes students disagree with my political perspective, so they tube my evaluation,” he said. “If it is a constructive criticism about my teaching methodology, then I take it into account very heavily. If it is a complaint about my political perspective, I just take it in stride.”
Lougee said the content of the Political Sociology class he taught made it difficult to keep his opinions out of the course.
Chen said that he has viewed his professors’ ratings online.
“For the most part, I think they’re pretty accurate,” he said. “The teachers I know that I think are good teachers generally have high ratings.”
Chen said the ratings can help students decide which classes to take.
“(The system is) something that helps inform your decision,” he said. “But I think in the final analysis that you should e-mail the professor or talk to them.”
Several people in various academic departments and a University administrator disagreed about whether students can see written comments from course evaluations.
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Jack Rice said it is up to each department to determine the availability of the comments written on evaluations.
Responses to inquiries regarding availability varied.
The political science and mathematics departments said that written comments are not available for students to look at.
“In general, we don’t open up the file drawer and let people peruse them,” said Erica Whitty, the undergraduate secretary of mathematics, adding that specific concerns might warrant looking at the files.
Other departments weren’t sure what they would do if approached by a student asking to see the written comments.
“We would follow the University policy, whatever it was,” said Georgette Winther, the graduate secretary of economics. “I don’t know if anybody has ever asked to do that.”
“I don’t think it’s ever come up,” agreed Zara Logue, the office specialist for multimedia design.
Professor Scott Pratt, head of the philosophy department, said release of written comments would seem to require both faculty consideration and consent from each of the students who wrote and signed the evaluations.
Regardless of the availability of written comments, students and faculty agreed that course evaluations help the University work better.
“You can never stop a student from having an opinion,” Chen said.