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December 13, 2005
Students teach professors: Using evaluations as tools
Along with the end of the semester comes term papers, cumulative finals and presentations. Along with these projects, students are given one final assignmentčto evaluate their courses. However, since moving from paper evaluations in class to online submissions, compliance has dropped below 50 percent.
In an effort to boost last semester’s course evaluation compliance, numerous incentives were offered to encourage students to participate, including an iPod giveaway and two $50 cash prizes.
But that didn’t seem to work. Compliance didn’t increase at all; in fact, it dropped last spring by 6 percentage points, down to 46 percent.
“On the average, less than half of the students actually did the evaluations,” said Online Evaluations
Committee member Professor Jerry Artz. “It’s a big drop.”
Now the the Faculty Personnel Committee (FPC) is left to determine what to do about this problem. The FPC, in association with the dean’s office, is responsible for reading through the evaluations.
Course evaluations began last Thursday and run through the last day of finals. What happens if the compliance rates drop again?
“There is no plan to reevaluate the current process,” FPC chair Professor Joseph Peschek said. However, he has though about it.
The anonymous evaluations play a larger role in curricular changes and faculty reviews that students may think.
“To me, student input is huge in my classes, and I have made changes based on student input,” Artz said.
Next semester, Artz is “going to build [evaluations] into the course outline” as a requirement.
Artz suggested that perhaps some of the tenured faculty were just not as engaged as other faculty members due to greater stability in their position.
He also said that another possible reason for the drop in compliance rates could have been because the evaluation pool last semester was larger than other semesters, with more classes to be evaluated.
The 2004-06 CLA Bulletin, which lists various policies, rules and courses, states that all students are expected to fully participate in the course evaluation process.
“It’s a contract,” Artz said.
The faculty needs to tell students that “their evaluations do matter and they [should be] taken seriously,” Peschek said.
The evaluations are anonymous and the evaluation period will end on Tuesday, Dec. 20 at 6:30 p.m. The evaluations can be found online at www.hamline.edu/evaulations.
Posted by msveum at December 13, 2005 12:38 PM
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