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March 2, 2007 > News > Students will soon see peers’ course evals

Students will soon see peers’ course evals

By Beko Binder | Thresher Editorial Staff

The Faculty Senate unanimously approved a motion to restructure online course evaluations and make the results available to students at its meeting Wednesday. The decision comes two years after a plan to post scanned evaluations online died in the senate and one year after the Student Association introduced its own online course evaluation system.

Political Science Professor Richard Stoll opened discussion by announcing structural changes to online course evaluations. Since the forms have been handled through ESTHER, response rates have been unusually low — 37.4 percent of students filled out an evaluation form in the fall, and 45 percent completed an evaluation last spring. Response rates for paper evaluations averaged about 50 percent.

Stoll also suggested that the comments from evaluations be made available for students to access online and proposed that faculty be given the option to “opt out” of having their evaluations publicized.

Previously, online course evaluations had one question per page, forcing students to go through hundreds of individual pages to fill out the forms. Under the new system, all questions about a particular course are condensed onto a single Web page, reducing the time students spend navigating.

Registrar David Tenney (Sid ‘87) said the decline in responses was partially due to by the introduction of the SA’s evaluation Web site, the SA Course Guide, last March. The Course Guide publishes evaluation responses for general viewing by undergraduates.

By allowing students to see their peers’ reviews, online evaluations will become focused in a single system, he said.

Will Rice College junior Ashley Allen — who filled out evaluations on ESTHER last year — said making official evaluation results open to students would be helpful because the SA Web site does not have reviews for all classes. However, she is concerned that most students who fill out evaluations feel negatively about their classes.

“I feel like what ends up happening is the students who are more likely to go on and actually fill them out are those with serious complaints,” Allen said. “It doesn’t allow professors to get a general census of how students felt about a class overall.”

Tenney said he thinks making the evaluations public will increase the student response rate.

“I highly expect it will help,” he said. “I’m going to be surprised and disappointed if it doesn’t. The next step would be withholding grades: no eval, no grade. I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

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