Evaluation responses up by over 50 percent
After the response rate for online course evaluations fell to 37 percent at the end of last semester, the Registrar’s Office decided to pull out their secret weapon — a Playstation 3. The console was given away in a drawing to one student as a reward for filling out their course evaluations. As of May 16, the response rate for course evaluations overall was 86 percent with over 90 percent of undergraduates completing the online forms. This percentage is not fi nal, as there are still two weeks left for students to fi ll out evaluations. In the past — before course evaluations were moved to ESTHER — the average response rate was between 50 and 60 percent. Registrar David Tenney said while a PS3 may be one reason response rates have increased, it certainly is not the only one. He said he believes a newly designed online course evaluation form was another reason more people responded. “Every one told me how much they appreciated a one-page form instead of a one-page-per-question form,” he said. “The form made it much easier to fill out.” Tenney said asking students to fill out the evaluation forms in order to see their grades and keeping course evaluations open for six weeks were also important factors that contributed to the increased response rate. “We had learned in the past that the time frame was too small, and it was at the busiest time of the year when everyone had finals,” he said. This year, students were allowed to submit a blank evaluation before viewing their grades, but Tenney said hardly anyone used that option. Tenney said the comments from this semester’s evaluations will be available on ESTHER by the beginning of next semester. “I have to believe that made a big impact for the success, too, because students — now having the ability to see the results — actually took this seriously and gave a lot of good constructive feedback,” he said. Of the 86 percent who responded, only four percent submitted a blank form. He said the current one-page format of the evaluations will be used again, and he hopes the Office of the Provost will continue to fund prizes. Sid Richardson College sophomore David Kim said the prize giveaways did not motivate him to complete the evaluations. “There was no chance I was going to win the Playstation 3,” he said.
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